How do districts
like yours handle it?
Every board asks it — about leave, cell phones, extra duty pay, evaluation cycles — and the answer usually arrives as a listserv thread and three PDFs a colleague emailed over. Compass answers from the policies, negotiated agreements, and handbooks of Minnesota districts in your own enrollment band and region, with a cited page behind every claim.
Already using Compass? Sign in to Compass
Comparability is the product
A general-purpose chatbot will happily tell you what “many districts” do, from nothing in particular. Compass answers from a specific, named set of documents belonging to districts that actually look like yours — and shows you the set.
Your size, your region — enforced
A 400-student district shouldn't be handed Wayzata's staffing model. Enrollment band and region are filters applied inside the database before anything is ranked, so an out-of-band document is never retrieved and can never leak into an answer.
A cited page behind every claim
Every sentence points at a district, a document, and a page. Click the citation and the source opens to that page with the excerpt highlighted — so you can read the actual contract language, not a paraphrase of it.
It tells you what it didn't find
Each answer names the districts it drew on and the comparable districts that had nothing on file. Thin coverage is stated plainly rather than smoothed over — silent gaps are how a research tool loses your trust.
A question to a cited answer
Set your scope
Start from your own district's band and region, then narrow or widen: locale, document type, employee group, how recent.
Ask in plain language
“How do districts our size handle paid time off for teachers?” — no keyword syntax, no policy code required.
Read a comparative answer
Where most of the group lands, who differs, and how that compares to the MSBA model policy — streamed as it's written.
Verify the source
Open any citation to the exact page of the district's own document, with its provenance and verification badge.
What Compass reads
- Board policies, matched on MSBA policy numbers
- Ratified negotiated agreements, by employee group
- Staff and student handbooks
- Approved board minutes
And the pay grids, charted
The salary schedules printed in negotiated agreements are pulled out and put on one chart — district against district, and one school year against the next, cell by cell. Lane spellings are normalized, so “BA+30” and “B.A. + 30 credits” land in the same column instead of quietly dropping a district out of the comparison. Read the grid before the bargaining team asks for it.
A shared corpus, handled carefully
Compass aggregates government data from hundreds of political subdivisions. What keeps that responsible is intake discipline, not a disclaimer.
Public records only
Compass ingests finalized public data — adopted policies, ratified agreements, approved minutes. Drafts mid-negotiation, anything with private personnel data under Minn. Stat. § 13.43, and anything touching student data are classified out by a person during review, not by a model.
Nothing is searchable until a human publishes it
Every document passes a review queue where an admin confirms the metadata and the data classification. Citations carry where the file came from and when it was retrieved, so a stale policy is visible as a stale policy.
What beta means here
Compass works today, and the corpus is still filling in — some regions and document types have more coverage than others. That's deliberately visible rather than hidden: every answer names the comparable districts it found nothing from, so you always know whether you're reading a pattern or a coincidence. Districts joining now shape the sourcing priorities, and adding your own documents is the fastest way to improve answers for districts like yours.
Stop asking the listserv
Compass is included with a BoardOps subscription — there's no separate signup, so tell us your district and we'll set your board up.
Compass describes what other districts do. It is research, not legal advice — verify the cited source and consult your district's counsel before acting.