Case Study: Los Angeles Unified School District achieves safe, accelerated return to classrooms with Microsoft Power Apps

LA Unified rallies partners to build COVID-19 tracking app and accelerate getting kids back to school

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which serves 650,000 students and 75,000 staff across 1,400 schools, faced the challenge of safely reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic while balancing learning, health, and equity. To coordinate screening, testing, and contact tracing at scale, LAUSD partnered with Microsoft Power Apps and used Power Apps and Power BI to develop a digital solution.

Microsoft Power Apps built the Daily Pass app and accompanying dashboards so students, staff, and visitors complete symptom screenings, confirm recent negative tests (or book overnight testing), and receive QR codes for school entry; the system also provides real-time analytics for contact tracing and situational monitoring. The Microsoft Power Apps solution scaled across LAUSD’s 650,000 students and 75,000 employees, supported a weekly-testing strategy to meaningfully lower transmission risk, centralized reporting and faster test turnaround, and increased confidence among families and administrators as schools reopened.

Los Angeles Unified School District

Austin Beutner

Superintendent