By Sharon Love, CEO, LINQ
The most useful thing I’ve done as LINQ’s new CEO is listen.
I listened to school district financial officers working until midnight to make sure every payroll goes out right. To nutrition directors planning summer meal routes in March. To superintendents running buildings that double as polling places, gathering spaces, and storm shelters.
Over the last four months, I sat with school district leaders across the nation. Here are five things they told me that we should all take to heart.
1. School districts endure as one of the last pieces of civic infrastructure many American communities still have.
Alongside public libraries, community centers, and a shrinking number of other public spaces, school districts function at the heart of community life. Residents vote, gather for seasonal festivals, and take shelter during storms in school buildings. For district leaders and staff, the work doesn’t stop when the school year ends. Millions of kids depend on summer meal programs delivered with logistical precision that would impress any commercial operator. And in many counties, the district is the single largest employer, offering accessible, schedule-compatible jobs that let parents be home when their kids are home. They’re jobs that do the vital work of helping kids thrive.
If we only think of school districts as the places where children learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, we’re missing a huge part of what they actually do.
2. Nutrition isn’t a parallel program to instruction. It’s the prerequisite.
School meals are funded through a layered system of federal dollars, state matches, and local contributions. But lunch still gets treated as something that competes with the school day, when it’s actually what makes the school day work. Every one of those funding streams exists because research is clear: kids don’t learn on empty stomachs. And they can’t absorb that investment in 12 minutes.
Schools prepare thoughtful, healthy meals. Kids deserve time to enjoy them, so they can return to class fed and ready to learn.
3. A district CFO’s job isn’t to produce the data. It’s to produce the context.
The same number means one thing to a school board, another to a county commissioner, another to a journalist, and yet another to a parent. Every figure a district publishes has to survive multiple audiences and outlast multiple audits. Most ERP and finance tools are built to extract numbers. Districts need tools that help them tell the story behind the numbers, because the number alone can’t do the work.
It’s the narrative, not just the number.
4. Well-intentioned policies routinely collide in the real world.
USDA Buy American rules push districts to source locally. Farmers need multi-year purchase commitments to plan their planting cycles. Public procurement rules often prohibit multi-year food contracts. Each policy is defensible on its own. Together, they close the door they were meant to open. Policy is written vertically inside single agencies.
Operators live at the horizontal intersections nobody designed.
5. K-12 operations run at commercial tempo under public-sector scrutiny.
District financial officers run payroll on immovable deadlines. Nutrition directors serve millions of meals a day. HR hires through state certification windows. Facilities teams keep buildings running year-round. All in real time, all under board oversight, all defensible to auditors years later, pulled from the same records. Most industries put speed and rigor in different lanes with different tooling. K-12 doesn’t. Same entry, same source documents, two very different audiences reading them on very different clocks.
That’s a category of work the broader software market mostly hasn’t designed for.
The people running America’s school districts are doing more, simultaneously, with more constraints and more scrutiny, than almost any operators I’ve encountered. I’m grateful to every leader who shared their time and told me the truth. The kids they’re showing up for every day — that’s why LINQ exists. My job is to make sure we’re worthy of the trust they place in us.