Databus Issue: 2007 3 09/17/2007
Consolidate, Integrate, Interoperate
Stephen Choi director of technology
PDF
At San Marino Unified School District
(SMUSD) we focus on creating and
maintaining learning environments
that encourage each student to develop
his/her intellectual, social, and personal
qualities in order to participate fully in an
interconnected community—be it local or
global.
This idea of interconnected communities
is especially relevant in light of the
new emerging technologies focused on
shrinking the gap between the classroom
and the home. District administrators,
teachers and technologists are realizing
that a child’s “learning environment” is
not limited to a school building but the
combination of home, school and community,
collaborating to bring the larger
world into day-to-day instruction and provide
richer learning opportunities.
SMUSD recently took the first steps
toward building a more interconnected
learning environment for our more than
3,300 students, teachers and administrators
when we implemented Pearson School
Systems’ PowerSchool Student Information
System (SIS). This system allowed
our district to maximize resources, realize
cost savings and increase overall efficiency
district-wide.
When selecting an SIS for our district,
we wanted a system that was entirely webbased,
fully CSIS capable, used a single
server to centralize all student data and
most importantly, was SIF compliant.
Why was SIF such a critical component
in our decision? SIF is the industry-supported
standard for communication for
K-12 software, enabling diverse applications
to interact and share data without
any additional programming. SIF views
any size school or district as a single system
of data in which instructional and
administrative systems including student
information, library, food services and
transportation, make up the component
parts. SIF enables these diverse applications
to interact and share data efficiently,
reliably, quickly and securely regardless
of the type of application. Without this
level of interoperability, several difficulties
can arise, such as the isolation of
applications and their data, redundant
data entry, increased support costs, costly
and inefficient data reporting, and a lack
of available, accurate data for key decision
makers in the district. These factors
contributed heavily to our decision to find
a student-information system that was not
only SIF compliant but shared our philosophy
regarding the importance of SIF.
PowerSchool met all of our criteria.
It was architected from the ground up
as a web-based application, allows CSIS
certified districts to validate, format and
transmit reports to the state painlessly,
uses a centralized server to handle student
data and strongly advocates a best-ofbreed
vendor approach to implementing
SIF. PowerSchool’s SIF compliance enables
technology coordinators to easily integrate
preferred SIS applications with others
like transportation, library automation,
special education and food services.
At SMUSD, we’re taking advantage of
PowerSchool’s SIF agent to integrate
with NutriKids (our lunch software) and
Destiny (our library management tool).
Ideally, we would like to use the SIF agent
to integrate our health records, financial
systems, HR data and LDAP open directory
as well. PowerSchool’s SIF agent
provides SMUSD the appropriate tools for
a smooth integration with other SIF-compliant
applications and makes real-time
data sharing possible without the need for
additional programming—which means
increased time-savings for our teachers
and administrators.
The cost savings we’ve realized are
largely related to PowerSchool’s centralized
server and the elimination of
unnecessary resources and hardware. Our
previous solution was a client-server application
where each school had to house
and manage its own individual server.
PowerSchool now serves as the central
repository for our student demographic
data and is used for an abundance of daily
administrative functions such as generating
class schedules, attendance records,
grade checks, report cards, transcripts and
form letters all with just a few clicks.
We’ve also used the system to improve
our overall registration process. Now
the moment a student is registered in the
district, they are given a lunch and library
account. There’s no longer a need to
manually integrate this data between the
various systems and school sites because
it is instantly completed during the initial
registration process. This eliminates
unnecessary lines and disruptions at lunch
and in the library while waiting for a new
student account to be created.
We’ve received an overwhelmingly
positive response to the PowerSchool
system from our district’s administrators
and teachers. Many have commented
on the increased time-savings that have
been created by the SIF integration of our
various systems. Administrators value
the immediate access they now have to
the full scope of district data and teachers
are harnessing this real-time data to
drive teaching and learning decisions in
the classroom. Data-driven decision making
is truly in effect at SMUSD. We’re
continuing to uncover additional benefits
of implementing this system and plan to
continue to automate and consolidate as
many processes as possible in our district.
With PowerSchool, this desire is quickly
becoming a reality!
