Blogs

Discipline data is one area in which schools strive to keep accurate and up-to-date records. Incidents is just one of the methods available to users.

Attendance. What can we say? It's no longer as simple as marking students tardy and adding them up. For many schools, tracking attendance with the multitudes of attendance codes and conversions becomes a full-time job.

Human error during data entry into any School District’s SIS still today remains one of the most problematic issues for keeping student and staff data clean and accurate. And it’s only getting worse as many districts nationwide have begun to allow parents to register their child online.

Public school districts nationwide – particularly smaller districts – continue to deal with penny-pinching budgets as numbers rise for students transitioning to Virtual Academies, Charter Academies, private schools, and homeschooling options.

One big advantage for smaller school districts is the ability for teachers, principals, and other staff to get to know the students on a very personal level. It leads to better educational opportunities in many ways and brings citizens of small communities together.

What a wonderful world teachers, administrators, and counselors would be living in if they could – in a matter of minutes – easily track the local, state, and national test scores of their entire student body.

In a generation captivated with voter polls, sports rankings, and lists for best places to live, Belinda McEachern is certain who is her No. 1 – Level Data.

Dan Ralyea often finds himself in a unique position – where most of his contemporaries in state education data analysis look upon his state of South Carolina with envy.

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.”

Student headcount accuracy is the most critical factor effecting government-funded school district budgets; few would question that fact.