David McGeary

The wiring between school software and the districts that actually run it.

I design and build K-12 integrations: single sign-on, rostering, and the middleware in between. The part of the product nobody demos and every district depends on.

Pre-sales technical engineer at Clever Previously 8 years solutions architecture at D2L Houston, TX
SSO handoff

A teacher taps a classroom panel that has no browser session to hand off. Five steps later they are signed in with their district identity. This is the flow behind the relay in the work below.

Classroom display no browser session SIGNED IN Relay service headless broker District IdP OAuth 2.0 / SAML

01Display asks the relay for a session

The device never holds the district credential. It holds a session the relay hands it after the exchange completes.

Practice

Single sign-on

Auth flows between identity providers, LMS platforms, and classroom hardware. Including the cases where a vendor's stack and a district's stack were never designed to speak to each other, and something has to broker the handoff.

OAuth 2.0SAMLOIDCLTI 1.3

Rostering

Pipelines that move students, staff, sections, and enrollments into an application on a nightly cadence, and keep them correct through adds, drops, transfers, and mid-year schedule changes.

OneRosterClever APISIS exportsSFTP

Middleware

The translation layer nobody wants to own. Field mapping, identity matching, idempotent syncs, retry logic, and the reconciliation report someone opens when a teacher says her class roster is empty.

PythonNode.jsDockerREST

Pre-sales architecture

Technical discovery with district IT, integration design during an evaluation, and the architecture proposal that has to survive a security review before anyone signs anything.

DiscoverySolution designSecurity review
The calendar

K-12 integration work runs on the school year, not on a sprint board. That constraint shapes every technical decision worth making in this field.

JUN — JUL

Rollover

Last year's sections archive. Next year's do not exist yet. Most integrations are pointed at data that is briefly, legitimately empty.

AUGUST

First day

Every provisioning bug becomes a help desk ticket at 7:45am, with a teacher and thirty students waiting. There is no staged rollout.

SEP — DEC

Steady state

Adds, drops, transfers. The sync has to handle a student changing schools on a Tuesday without orphaning the account.

JANUARY

Semester flip

Schedules change underneath live accounts. Course enrollments turn over while the identities behind them stay put.

Selected work

SSO relay for interactive classroom displays

Proof of concept

A service that brokered a district SSO login on classroom hardware that had no usable browser session to hand off. Headless auth flow, token relay back to the device, containerized behind a reverse proxy with automatic certificate issuance.

Node.jsOAuth 2.0DockerTraefik

SIS-to-LMS rostering middleware

Production

A pipeline that pulled rosters from a district SSO platform's API and provisioned users, courses, and enrollments into an LMS for a nonprofit school network. Built idempotent, so a re-run after a partial failure reconciled instead of duplicating enrollments.

PythonRESTScheduled sync

K-12 AI legislative map

Personal project

A state-by-state map of pending and enacted K-12 AI legislation, synced from a bill-tracking API and reviewed by hand. Built because the policy landscape schools are being asked to navigate changes faster than anyone is summarizing it.

LegiScan APIStatic site

Sales engineering tooling

Internal

Tools built for my own pre-sales practice: a discovery instrument that scores technical fit from a conversation with a non-technical buyer, and a simulated district application used to demonstrate live integration behavior during a call rather than describing it.

PythonNode.jsSelf-hosted
Live project

K-12 AI Legislative Map

Running

State-by-state view of pending and enacted K-12 AI legislation, synced from LegiScan and reviewed by hand. Running on the same box as everything else here.

Open the full map  ·  Source on GitHub

Running now

Services on my own VPS, behind Traefik with automatic certificate issuance. Read from the host, not hand-written.

traefik
checking
clever-poc
checking
demo2win-mcp
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reading status…

Background
Current

Pre-Sales Technical Engineer, Clever

Technical support for enterprise sales at the SSO and rostering platform used across a large share of US K-12 districts. Discovery, integration architecture, proof-of-concept builds, and the technical side of partner evaluations.

8 years

Solutions Architect, D2L

Architecture and integration work on Brightspace across K-12 and higher education: LTI tool integrations, SIS data flows, and implementation design for institutions bringing the LMS into an existing systems landscape.

Contact

Open to conversations about K-12 integration architecture, rostering and identity problems, and where AI tooling actually fits in a school systems landscape.

dave@edtecharchitect.com