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.

In an education world that has progressively shifted toward online options, the opportunity to allow parents to enroll their child online is available as well.

Yet when K-12 school districts consider that the journey of their student data can start outside of the district staff’s control, the pros and cons should be weighed heavily before making that software investment leap.

With the release of PowerSchool 23.5 (released May 2023), PowerSchool introduced a new “Enhanced User Interface” feature which implements an entirely new navigation structure to all PowerSchool pages. This new navigation structure required that our Level Data Apps services be restructured to comply with these new layout requirements.

With the release of PowerSchool 23.5 (released May 2023), PowerSchool introduced a new “Enhanced User Interface” feature which implements an entirely new navigation structure to all PowerSchool pages. This new navigation structure required that our Level Data Apps services be restructured to comply with these new layout requirements.

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.

When PowerSchool introduced Unlimited Contacts in 2018, many districts saw this as both a blessing and a curse.  With the long-time, limited ability to store contact data for students, PowerSchool was finally responding to years of calls for change.

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.