No one in education wants an incident – but when something troubling does happen with any student or student groups, recording accurate data from the incident is imperative.

Vicky Sanchez, the Data Systems Specialist for Cheltenham (PA) School District, turned to Level Data to create a partnership to make sure their district’s annual Incident Management Reports to the Keystone state’s Safe Schools program were right the first time.

What she didn’t realize was how much more state reporting support and accuracy she would receive – plus large amounts of time saved – when utilizing Level Data’s State Data Validation Suite.

“It started with Incident Management, which is part of a huge report for ‘Safe Schools’ in Pennsylvania and we were having a lot of issues with that one report,” Sanchez said. “The report has so many different templates and components and a lot of our staff were not entering the information correctly and there were a lot of missing elements, conflicting information.

“So, the bottom line is we got Level Data’s State Validation Suite specifically for Incident Management. But the nice part is we have benefitted from all the other parts of State Validation as well – State Validation Suite tabs like demographics, enrollment, and the miscellaneous tabs that have different rules based on the state reporting rules that we use to cross-check our data entry. It makes sure we didn’t miss any information and that nothing’s mismatched.”

“It’s made everything so much easier for me to do the uploads for state reporting – and not just for incident management, but for enrollment and everything else.”

Level Data’s State Data Validation Suite allows virtually any district staff to input state data reporting requirements. The system has checks and balances with the district’s raw data stored in PowerSchool – where color indicators of red, yellow, and green are then displayed when the Suite automatically and instantaneously detects data errors, potential data errors, or the correct data, respectively, per color.

“The expected result was a large improvement in Incident Management, and we got that,” Sanchez added. “When you enter an incident in PowerSchool, unless you’re missing some data that’s a key, required field, you don’t really know if you’re doing it right or wrong – so these rules (set up by Level Data) really helped to tell whoever was entering the information if they have any missing components or a mismatch. It would tell them what to add and it really cleaned up our data tremendously.

“It’s made everything so much easier for me to do the uploads for state reporting – and not just for incident management, but for enrollment and everything else.”