Blogs

When the state of Alabama implemented PowerSchool statewide in 2021 as the mandatory SIS for school districts, it not surprisingly forced many districts to make drastic changes to how they had been storing, tracking and managing student data.

Thankfully for data managers like Greg Titshaw, Technology Coordinator at Fort Payne City Schools in Alabama, Level Data Inc.’s State Data Validation Suite was included in the statewide implementation of PowerSchool.

Simply, it made life simpler.

And it made possible the drastically improved accuracy of the small school district’s data.

Tish Brandt still thinks back in some disbelief at how cumbersome and time consuming the old way of reporting school data to the state was for her team at Cicero (IL) Public Schools.

“There we so many different layers of complication there,” Brandt said about the former process, before technology advances made it easier and more accurate.

The layers have been virtually eliminated since Cicero began working in 2021 with Level Data and its IT plug in of seamless and smooth reporting with the State Data Validation Suite (SDVS) – a software plug-in for users of PowerSchool.

School districts nationwide can now get real-time information in less than five minutes for more than two dozen categories ranging from attendance to gradebook analysis to truancy to lunch status to family lists and demographics, to discipline to mapping addresses for busing and tracking district demographic changes, to name a few.

As funding for school districts nationwide continues to get tighter, IT directors are seeking more solutions for managing user accounts.

Level Data, LLC in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is the first to offer school districts nationwide a direct to Microsoft Azure user account management service, eliminating the recurring expenses and maintenance costs of on-premises domain controllers.

With staff shortages and schools recovering from the chaos of the past few pandemic years, any savings of time by not duplicating efforts, especially when improved data accuracy comes with it, is certainly a welcoming sight.

Like all educators know, 2 + 2 = 4.

And like Technology, Learning, and Innovation Director, Jesse Sadlowski and Tina Carnegie,
Administrative Assistant and Tech Support know, clean and accurate student data = clean and accurate government reporting.

Accessing Student Data is a key element of any SIS. But taking that data and analyzing it typically requires exporting out of the system and manipulating it within some other external tool. One area that can be tricky, especially if no specific field is used, is identifying if a student resides in or out of the district. However, with the use of Level Data’s In-District Enrollment Status Report, users can now easily identify in-district versus out-of-district students with the click of a button.

Accessing student data is a key element of any SIS, but taking that data and analyzing it typically requires exporting out of the system and manipulating it with some other external tool. This is especially true when attempting to plan based on where your student population actually resides. But what if you could not only see where your students reside on a map but also be able to slice and dice the records by creating your own boundaries? Not only creating them but being able to share those regions with others. Well, with the use of Level Data’s new School Population Planning Report, users can now do just that.

Reviewing stored grades for students is a common activity for staff, especially for staff like principals and counselors. While retrieving data for individual students isn't too complicated, getting to the data for larger groups or even getting to a view that is a bit easier to read and that can be filtered based on specific criteria gets a bit more complicated. However, with the use of our Stored Grade Analysis Report, this process just got a whole lot easier.

Standard grading has become a popular method of tracking a student's achievement. While often used at the elementary level standards-based grading can be found at any level, configuring standards and entering scores is one part of the process, and reporting them is another. While the most common need is for individual student-based reports, schools often want to look at standards through a bigger window. However, generating this type of report is not a simple process. There aren't many built-in reports that can access the records schools need without complicated searches and exporting processes. But with the use of our Standards Grade Analysis Report, accessing standards grades has just gotten easier.