Delivering Data You Can Trust

Supporting the access needs of your district is enough to fill a full-time job. Your departments and schools depend on a variety of applications to get work done. If you’re okay with a “bandaid” fix instead of a real solution, you could use a patchwork of a few platforms and hope for the best. A piecemeal solution carries a considerable risk of being inefficient, overcomplicated or accidentally vulnerable to exploitation.

Your faculty, staff and students need something quick and easy to use. You need something secure - a comprehensive system that ties in neatly and completely to your existing network. As a part of your directory integration processes, a single sign-on service ensures easy and safe access to the applications you need and rely upon.
This checklist helps you measure if an SSO solution is enough to deliver convenient, secure performance for your schools, staff and students.

Education is unique among industry sectors because of the extreme rate of turnover. When viewed from a 30,000-foot perspective, the "churn-rate" for students enrolling, transferring, dropping out or graduating from even a modestly sized district is enough to eclipse all but the biggest multinational companies. Add in the rate of burnout for educators - roughly 50% of teachers leave the field within their first 5 years - and it's plain to see why having a holistic account provisioning plan is critical for a district's technology infrastructure, digital security and user access plans. 

Because schools aren’t handling vast numbers of consumer transactions, it's easy to mistakenly believe them to be the last place likely to be hacked. Consider this - over 700 breaches of K-12 systems have been reported since 2016, and over 100 known incidents just in 2019! While restaurants and retail represent “get rich quick” opportunities for cyber-criminals, school databases are warehouses of sensitive personal information that could be mined for months or even years before detection. After all, who's looking at the credit of a first-grader on a regular basis?

RealTime Reports pulls back the curtain on district data in PowerSchool and helps school staff easily find and understand the valuable information they need without the need for complicated codes or expertise in Enterprise Reporting. All reports in the dashboard can be tailored using filters to refine the information, and are being updated regularly to maximize usability, functionality and value.

Level Data performed a service update starting at 3:30 PM EST on Thursday, August 6, 2020. No downtime was associated with this update.

Want to learn more about power to transform your data using the State Data Validation Suite? Join one of our live webinars hosted by seasoned data pros every Tuesday and Thursday!

According to a recent study, a majority of surveyed districts used at least 26 different software applications to meet the needs of their needs. The demands of the front office are wholly different than the needs of a teacher's gradebook, the lunchroom's food service database and the transportation department's CRM. With a smattering of different systems employed, a range of potential security risks is all but inevitable. 

The majority of school districts in the United States employ at least 26 different software platforms or applications to meet the functional demands of their district. Trying to manually guide data across so many platforms while maintaining the accuracy and integrity of that information would require hours of work from a dedicated team - time and resources that many districts simply can’t afford to sacrifice on peripheral tasks. 

Maximizing school district funding value is crucial in the education landscape of today. School districts work hard to ensure that every penny of available reimbursement dollars is fully accounted for.

Over 700 breaches of K-12 databases have been recognized in the United States alone since 2017. Phishing schemes, ransomware attacks and denials-of-service tactics have been employed to access or distribute sensitive information belonging to students, faculty and staff. 

Level Data applications integrate tightly with PowerSchool. These include page enhancement applications like RealTime Validation, and full page applications like State Data Validation and Validation Reporting.

Each of these applications has options available to help District Administrators apply the appropriate security options, as per their district policies and following PowerSchool security guidelines.

This document will outline how Level Data’s PowerSchool applications have been integrated to work with PowerSchool’s security mechanisms, in order to properly secure the applications.