Case study · Internal work, not a client engagement

The deadline, delivered.

Region 3 Education Service Center announces trainings, deadlines, and conferences to dozens of school districts—mostly by email. ESC3 Important Dates is a public calendar and iCal feed service that turns the spreadsheets those departments were already keeping into calendars districts can subscribe to.

Organization: Region 3 Education Service Center, Victoria, Texas
Developed: By Donnie Clapp and his team, while employed by Region 3 ESC
Ownership: © Region 3 ESC. Not an Applause Consulting product.
Scope: Calendar service: sheet sync, public site, iCal feeds
Stack: TypeScript · Hono · React · SQLite · Google Sheets API
Status: In beta with Region 3 departments

No Single Calendar

Every department at the service center keeps its own list of important dates—PEIMS submission windows, budget workshops, superintendent round tables—in spreadsheets. The dates reach districts as mass emails, and a district that misses the email can miss the deadline.

The spreadsheets weren't replaced. Directors prefer to keep using them, and software that requires people to change how they work tends not to last. Instead, the service reads each department's Google Sheet on a schedule, merges every department's dates into one public calendar, and serves iCal feeds that anyone can subscribe to. A superintendent can add their role's feed to Outlook once, and from then on new deadlines show up automatically.

The public calendar: a June month grid with training and deadline events, plus filter chips for audience, type, and department — The calendar can be filtered by role. There are eight roles, including superintendent, CFO and PEIMS director.

The mobile list view showing upcoming dates with type badges and a register button — On phones, the calendar grid switches to a list view. Registration is one tap away on mobile.

Built for Messy Spreadsheets

The system is built to handle errors in its source spreadsheets. Spreadsheets kept by busy people tend to have mistakes, and the sync engine is designed with that in mind. It finds the correct tab by its column headers, not by its tab name, so directors can rename or rearrange tabs without breaking the sync.

A malformed row is skipped and logged as a warning—it doesn't stop the sync, and a broken sheet from one department doesn't block the rest. An admin dashboard shows what synced, what didn't, and why. The feeds use the RFC 5545 iCal standard, which Google Calendar and Outlook have supported for decades, and each event keeps a stable identity across syncs. When a director corrects an event, subscribers see the event update instead of a duplicate.

Districts don't have to install an app, create accounts, or learn a new tool. The service is currently in beta with Region 3's departments, syncing their real spreadsheets every 30 minutes—and the mass emails announcing dates have already started getting shorter.

ESC3 Important Dates © Region 3 Education Service Center. All rights reserved by Region 3 ESC. Developed by Donnie Clapp and his team while employed by Region 3; nothing here is offered for sale or license by Applause Consulting.

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