Every decision made at Anne Arundel County Public Schools ultimately affects the students, educators, and families it serves, and with more than 80,000 students across 120+ schools, the stakes of getting data right are high. As one of Maryland's largest public school districts, AACPS depends on timely, accurate, and trustworthy information to drive outcomes in the classroom and across the organization. But behind the scenes, a data environment that had grown increasingly complex over time was making that harder than it should be. Data was spread across legacy Oracle datastores, disparate systems, and multiple Power BI workspaces without a unified foundation to connect them.
With a growing need to unify ingestion, transformation, reporting, and governance under a single architecture, district leaders recognized that Microsoft Fabric represented a promising path forward. The priority now was getting to a production-ready foundation as quickly as possible while equipping their team with the knowledge to scale it.
Through Valorem Reply's Fabric in 30 Days solution — a structured engagement designed to take organizations from concept to operational analytics platform in a single month — Valorem Reply partnered with AACPS to stand up a working Fabric environment on the district's own tenant, implement an end-to-end data pipeline using a medallion Lakehouse architecture, and demonstrate real analytical value all while building the internal knowledge and documentation needed for AACPS to own and operate the platform going forward.
The engagement transformed what had been a fragmented data environment into a cohesive, governed, and analytics-ready foundation, validating Fabric as the right platform for AACPS and positioning the district to confidently pursue its broader data modernization goals, including future AI scenarios powered by clean, unified data.
Microsoft Fabric has opened the door to use cases we hadn't imagined before. The pipelines, notebooks, and medallion architecture are performing well, the knowledge transfer was invaluable, and leadership is optimistic about where this is taking us. We couldn't have asked for a better experience — A++. - Jim Malone, Senior Systems Analyst, Anne Arundel County Public Schools
What Fabric in 30 Days delivers for organizations like Anne Arundel County Public Schools is a foundation they can actually build on. In 30 days, we replaced years of data fragmentation with a unified, governed analytics platform on Microsoft Fabric — giving their team the tools, the knowledge, and the roadmap to move forward with confidence. - Nicholas Burton, Client Partner, Valorem Reply
CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES
- Data fragmented across legacy Oracle datastores and multiple disconnected Power BI workspaces, with no unified platform for ingestion, transformation, or governance.
- Data teams spending excessive time manually managing and reconciling data across systems rather than delivering insights to educators and administrators.
- Inconsistent reporting and absence of a governed data foundation creating risk and limiting analytical confidence.
- No validated architecture, clear migration roadmap, or cost-effective path toward AI-ready analytics.
SOLUTIONS
- Designed and implemented a 30-day Microsoft Fabric implementation on the AACPS tenant, covering environment setup, governance, ingestion, modeling, reporting, and enablement.
- Configured a medallion Lakehouse architecture in OneLake with automated transformations, data quality checks, and deduplication via notebooks and pipelines.
- Developed a semantic model and working Power BI dashboard built on real AACPS data, alongside version control, DevOps practices, and deployment pipelines to support long-term operational discipline.
- Delivered a tech team transition workshop covering the full end-to-end workflow, including hands-on education on Fabric's Data Agents and Copilot capabilities.
RESULTS
- Validated a fully operational Microsoft Fabric environment on the AACPS tenant within 30 days, meeting every defined success criterion for the Fabric implementation.
- Delivered a complete end-to-end data pipeline — from raw ingestion through transformation to analytics-ready reporting — on a governed, unified platform.
- Produced a documented migration plan for existing Premium Power BI workspaces and a right-sized capacity recommendation balancing performance against cost.
- Established a modern, secure data foundation ready to support future AI and Copilot scenarios, with the internal team fully equipped to manage and expand the platform independently.
