AWS Public Sector Blog
Unlocking student success with generative AI: How Panorama Education built Solara on AWS
In the years since the pandemic, chronic absenteeism has surged. According to the US Department of Education, more than 25 percent of students now miss at least 10 percent of the school year, nearly double the pre-pandemic rate. At the same time, teacher burnout is rising under increasing workloads, and district leaders are under pressure to do more with less, which is further limiting educators’ capacity to support the students who need it most.
Panorama Education, a leading K12 education technology (EdTech) provider, saw an opportunity to help. With over a decade of experience supporting more than 2,000 school districts across North America, Panorama had already built powerful tools for integrating academic, attendance, behavior, and life skills into one unified view of student progress. To unlock the value of that data securely, Panorama built Solara, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Solara is designed to help educators make sense of student data faster, design personalized student improvement plans, and reduce administrative burden while maintaining trust and data privacy at scale.
Developing personalized student support with Solara on AWS
Solara is a secure, generative AI-powered platform built specifically for K12 educators. Through natural language prompts, teachers and leaders can ask Solara questions like “What areas does this student need support in?” Solara surfaces key insights into student behavior like chronic absenteeism, academic dips, or behavioral concerns and returns a concise, plain-language summary grounded in real data from the district’s existing systems.
For example, a school leader concerned about a student’s recent absences can ask Solara for possible correlations. The platform might identify a pattern among attendance, assessment, and behavioral data, linking missed days to declining grades and lower scores in self-efficacy from recent surveys. Within seconds, Solara can generate a personalized, evidence-based response plan that includes attendance, academic, or behavioral support strategies. Ultimately, Solara equips educators with timely, student-specific insights, so they can focus less on manual paperwork and more on helping students thrive as quickly as possible.
Building a generative AI-powered student support application on AWS
When Panorama set out to build Solara, security and data privacy were top priorities. “We started this project by focusing on privacy and security first,” said Danny Johnson, Panorama’s chief technology officer. “Solara was originally called the ‘Walled Garden’ because security was paramount.”
Back in 2023, Panorama migrated its product suite to AWS to enhance scalability, reliability, and security. When the team began developing Solara, AWS’s capabilities made it the natural choice. Throughout the solution design process, Panorama engaged with AWS solutions architects and strategists to get feedback on prompt design, logging best practices, optimized security posture, and more. “We continue to talk to the AWS Account Team about our journey and how they can plug in,” said Johnson.
Working with AWS allowed Panorama to align with the data privacy agreements already in place across thousands of districts, staying compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and Service Organization Control 2 (SOC 2) Type 2 standards. A key part of Solara is its data privacy model. “Everything we do is stateless, and we pass [the AI model] the context in real time,” said Johnson. “We’re not trying to train the model. We’re not passing your data anywhere. Your data is your data, and it’s not going anywhere else.”
Over the span of just a few months, Solara moved from idea to prototype to a working pilot. On the backend, Solara uses Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 in Amazon Bedrock as its large language model (LLM). Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) integrates with Amazon Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to manage secure, encrypted data storage. The team also utilized Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, enabling custom privacy and appropriate use. “These guardrails help us ensure the safety of the responses we’re giving back and makes sure they’re accurate and aligned to the question at hand. That way, we’re not answering things that are out of context or providing false or detrimental terms,” said Johnson.
Empowering educators with real-time insights
As of early 2025, Solara supports over 380,000 students across 25 states, with positive feedback from district leaders and classroom educators alike. Some highlights include:
- “It’s like having another, smarter person in the room so we don’t waste time going in circles and can ground our discussions in concrete ideas.”
- “We’ve uploaded our 504 user manual and procedural safeguards to Solara, along with other key documents. It effectively uses that information to ensure that when we ask a question, the response is accurate and aligned with our established protocols—which is really, really amazing.”
The platform has been especially helpful for surfacing early-warning indicators, such as attendance dips or missed assignments, that might otherwise go unnoticed in busy school environments. At Laguna Beach Unified School District, for example, Solara is helping staff act faster on student needs with the ability to draft district-aligned content in minutes such as student support plans, 504 plans, and differentiated instructional materials.
The future of Solara’s impact
Beyond the immediate time savings for educators and faster support for students, the Panorama team sees Solara as part of a broader mission: making teaching a more sustainable and rewarding profession. “Teachers spend less than half their time interacting with students, and we want that to grow. AI shows the promise of taking mundane, administrative tasks out of the day-to-day and letting educators focus on what they care about most: creating better outcomes for their students,” said John Kennedy, AI solutions lead for Panorama.
Panorama Education’s Solara is a compelling example of how generative AI, when designed thoughtfully, can address real-world challenges in education. “This is one of the more savvy implementations of AI in education technology…period,” said Greg Devine, senior sales leader for EdTechs at AWS. “In terms of how you can responsibly and safely put generative AI into a school system, Panorama is a standout use case.”
Learn more about how AWS helps EdTechs build, deploy, and scale solutions that support students and educators. Contact AWS today.