There are numerous ideas around "Recent Activity", some examples include:

Sticky Feature - https://blackbaudk12.ideas.aha.io/ideas/K12CO-I-1499
Filtering Recent Activity - https://blackbaudk12.ideas.aha.io/ideas/K12OM-I-714
Removing the Pulsating blue orb from Recent Activity - https://blackbaudk12.ideas.aha.io/ideas/K12CO-I-1948
Two Columns in Recent Activity - https://blackbaudk12.ideas.aha.io/ideas/K12CO-I-501

All of these ideas would benefit us as we have set "Recent Activity" as the landing page for our users.  Perhaps a way to handle various school's needs would be to have some kind of plugin architecture / manipulative stylesheet architecture where each school could customize these this page to our own needs similar to Wordpress, etc.?  I don't know if this would be possible given the hosted nature of the system in terms of security and stability, but just an idea.