Nicholas R. Chitwood.

My coworkers and I run student data operations at the Riverside County Office of Education. Twenty-three districts, about 420,000 students, partnerships with CCGI, the National Student Clearinghouse, the CSU system, and the State Treasurer's Office. The day-to-day: building the on-premises warehouse (RHEL 9, Kubernetes, Airflow, dbt, Tableau with row-level security), running the integration pipeline behind CalKIDS, and negotiating the data-sharing agreements that make these projects — and more — work for our schools. In addition, I've developed the systems and processes that make CSU Direct Admissions work for every high school in the county.

I came in through teaching — seven years directing high-school bands, then five running Title I monitoring and district curriculum-and-assessment programs before landing in this office. The same instinct that made me want to corral a hundred high schoolers into straight lines on a football field in Riverside heat now wants to provide structure and order to a fractured data landscape. I have an Ed.D. in Education Leadership and Policy from UCLA; my dissertation looked at how administrator behaviors shape whether teachers actually use the data they're given.

RCOE named me Classified Administrator of the Year in 2024. When I'm not at the office, I might be ferrying kids to soccer while keeping up with the latest hot thing in the modern data stack. Iceberg here I come.