Blogs

If fellow data management and IT directors were to challenge Jay Childers to describe in one word what he likes to see within his school district’s workforce and its expansive student database, that’s an easy one:

As school districts nationwide scurried to implement full-blown online learning in the midst of COVID-19 shutting down virtually all school buildings in early 2020, Oxford Community Schools in Michigan was one of those in the best position of any district to make a seamless transition – a transition that is yet to be determined if it’ll be temporary or long-term on-line learning.

Oxford has roughly 8,000 students in multiple school settings. These include traditional seated students, plus Oxford Bridges, an alternative school for kids who would struggle to make it through a typical high school setting, and a program called Crossroads, for adjudicated youth.

If Level Data cannot do a needed data task for Farmington Municipal Schools, it probably cannot be done by anyone.

That is the conclusion of the district’s Chief Technology Officer, Robert Emerson, since teaming up with Level Data to help the district synchronize and automate its student and teacher data in PowerSchool with Active Directory, Google and its OneRoster service. Even in a very unique situation, school officials discovered a K-12 science curriculum that was inaccessible for several months, and Level Data quickly provided the necessary tools for Emerson's team to overcome this hurdle.

Bad data reporting is no laughing matter to the IT staff of Kalispell School District #5.

Data Analyst Kyra Ocker said years of struggling with inaccurate data and ineffective information processes were a constant challenge the district grappled with until her district signed on for Level Data’s State Data Validation Suite. What had been a long running series of manual data-entry processes that allowed for ongoing human error – costing 1-2 hours a day manually cleaning data for state reports – has since become a spotless data point-of-pride for the 6,000-student school district. 

As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the nation, schools everywhere were discovering a somber truth - many people within their districts couldn’t count on a reliable internet connection. One district in rural Texas located due-South of the Greater Austin area found that 1-in-3 people, counting staff and students alike, lived in “dead zones” without internet or cell service. They were completely cut-off from the digital world at home through no fault of their own and falling behind because of it.

Education is unique among industry sectors because of the extreme rate of turnover. When viewed from a 30,000-foot perspective, the "churn-rate" for students enrolling, transferring, dropping out or graduating from even a modestly sized district is enough to eclipse all but the biggest multinational companies. Add in the rate of burnout for educators - roughly 50% of teachers leave the field within their first 5 years - and it's plain to see why having a holistic account provisioning plan is critical for a district's technology infrastructure, digital security and user access plans. 

According to a recent study, a majority of surveyed districts used at least 26 different software applications to meet the needs of their needs. The demands of the front office are wholly different than the needs of a teacher's gradebook, the lunchroom's food service database and the transportation department's CRM. With a smattering of different systems employed, a range of potential security risks is all but inevitable. 

The majority of school districts in the United States employ at least 26 different software platforms or applications to meet the functional demands of their district. Trying to manually guide data across so many platforms while maintaining the accuracy and integrity of that information would require hours of work from a dedicated team - time and resources that many districts simply can’t afford to sacrifice on peripheral tasks. 

Maximizing school district funding value is crucial in the education landscape of today. School districts work hard to ensure that every penny of available reimbursement dollars is fully accounted for.

Several months ago, we made significant updates with respect to respect PowerSchool’s two main security mechanisms: Page Level Security and Field Level Security. Please be sure to update your SDVS bundle soon. Version 2.x will no longer be supported as of April 1, and will be deactivated entirely on July 1, 2020.

The only way to prevent disruptions to your service is update your bundle to the latest version.

This document outlines three methods of installing Level Data’s PowerSchool applications, and provides a brief overview of the security configuration settings.