Blogs

Collecting, tracking and analyzing school district data on students and staff is not an easy task, but there are fairly simple, low cost or no cost ways to try making it easier – and result in much greater data accuracy in the process.

In many ways, improving data quality and accuracy is a mindset.

Cindy Williams had the stiff neck and crisscrossed eyes to prove she’d done her job protecting the critical funding her school district needed but was in threat of losing.

She is now 100 percent confident that using State Data Validation Suite (SDVS) software from Level Data, Inc. – those days are over.

Williams, most recently running PowerSchool in her new district of Limestone Charter Association in South Carolina but who came from a large traditional district, learned the hard way a few years ago about keeping student funding in place for her former district.

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.