About
Engage with Data
About Amanda
I started my career as a middle school social studies teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools.
It was a humbling experience, to say the least.
I learned about the rewards and challenges of supporting families and communities and also just how critical their well-being, stability, and partnership are for children to thrive.
Once I left teaching, I combined my love of data with my passion for supporting families and communities.
I founded Engage with Data (formerly Structured Solutions) in 2015 and haven’t looked back.
Since then, I have:
- Gotten my doctorate in K-12 Education Leadership and Policy from Vanderbilt University;
- Coached and supported organizations across the country with data collection, data literacy, and evaluation;
- Worked in schools of social work conducting research on family well-being; and
- Dedicated time as a volunteer supporting communities I’m passionate about.
In 2021, I became a mom.
They say becoming a parent changes everything, and they’re not wrong.
My first year of motherhood was SUCH a struggle, and it made me think about family well-being in a whole different way.
I now have a more holistic view of the types of supports families need to be healthy, stable, and happy.
And my lived experience – as a teacher, a mom, and as someone who really struggled in the postpartum phase – informs what I do every day.
Through Engage with Data, my goal is to help child- and family-serving organizations measure, share, and strengthen their programs in ways that matter most so that families get the supports they need and deserve.
It all started with a spreadsheet...
Engage with Data was founded in 2015 as Structured Solutions.
At the time, I was a Community School Coordinator in Baltimore, and I needed a better way to track our school’s attendance and family engagement patterns.
I got creative.
I developed easy-to-use spreadsheets that allowed our team to regularly monitor data and gain insight into why kids might be missing school or why their families might not be actively engaged.
We started to see improvement in the attendance rates of our chronically absent students, and we built a strong culture of engagement at our school.
I realized that many of my colleagues had never had an opportunity to really learn about data – how to collect it, what to use it for, and frankly, how to even interpret it.
Despite mandates and policies for schools and organizations to become data-driven and evidence-based, no one had helped people on the front lines build capacity in this area.
Engage with Data began out of the idea that there are simple ways to track and use data that can transform our work and provide more targeted and effective supports to children, families, and their communities.
Since 2015, I have worked with child- and family-serving organizations across the country to tell their story by building their team’s capacity in collecting and using data, establishing a culture of data, and effectively measuring their impact.
Here are some of the organizations I've helped:
“[Engage with Data] has worked with our organization to create custom Excel trainings for our funded partners. Amanda is very thorough and really sought to understand how Excel was being used, so she could tailor her content to fit participants’ needs. A good portion of the training was dedicated to hands-on application and allowed participants to practice what they learned. In addition to adhering to adult learning principles, Amanda is a joy to work with and is communicative, kind, and open to feedback.”
AMY BOPP
Family League of Baltimore
“[Engage with Data] has been a valued partner and program evaluator for the Engagement department for Baltimore City Public Schools by developing systems for an administrative evaluation of our partnerships and volunteers programs. She is collaborative in her approach and dedicated to setting goals and objectives to meet the desired results. Her analysis and recommendations helped to inform our decisions around resource allocation and capacity building activities as we worked to refine the focus of our partnerships and volunteers strategy.”
MONIQUE SIMMS
Baltimore City Public Schools