Through interoperability, Georgetown County School District no longer struggles with disconnected edtech products and siloed data. Instead, the district is using unified PowerSchool products that share data, inform instruction, save time, and expand their instructional capabilities.
Challenge
- Multiple, disparate edtech products; too many logins
Products & Solutions
- PowerSchool SIS
- PowerSchool Unified Classroom® solution
- PowerSchool Unified Classroom® Assessment
- PowerSchool Enrollment
Results
- Save time
- Increase capabilities and productivity
- Connect data to inform teaching
- Engage parents
- Inspire collaboration between teachers
- Improve state reporting
Today’s school districts depend on multiple software products to drive student success. But when those products are disconnected, they can end up costing districts in wasted time, reduced productivity, and diminished capabilities.
For South Carolina’s Georgetown County School District, their growing collection of software products lacked basic interoperability, each system operating separately in silos.
“The number of logins was getting ridiculous. The wasted time and frustration started to take away from what teachers were trying to do in the classroom,” says Jeannette Johnson, Georgetown’s Director of SIS Integration & Data Quality.
The district moved to an interoperable system centered around a student information system (SIS) from PowerSchool. Georgetown connected PowerSchool SIS with PowerSchool Unified Classroom™ management solution, Unified Classroom Assessment, and PowerSchool Enrollment. With these solutions integrating together, the district has benefited from a secure exchange of valuable K-12 data between their classroom and administrative software products.
“Before PowerSchool, we had all these different pieces, but they weren’t fully doing what we wanted them to do. We chose PowerSchool as a more integrated way of doing things,” Johnson says.
Interoperability connects data to inform teaching
Unified Classroom gives teachers the ability to manage grades, attendance, instruction, special needs, communication, and reporting—all in one place. With multiple connected products from PowerSchool, everyone has immediate access to real-time, comprehensive student performance data. Teachers can see all of the most important student information in one convenient dashboard.
“They can draw insights and make good decisions from that, instead of just moving onto the next lesson because that’s what they originally planned,” Johnson explains. “We want to give them better information to help them teach better. If we can get it in one place where it’s easy to see, then they don’t have to dig for it.”
Johnson says that the seamless integration of Unified Classroom with Assessment has improved students’ educational experience. “Because of the integration between products, students could get in and get going quickly. As long as they could log into a computer, they were good to go and were quickly rockin’ and rollin’. They didn’t lose focus,” Johnson says.
The district uses common assessments shared with multiple teachers. With online assessments tied directly to Unified Classroom, teachers can collaborate and share ones they feel would be helpful for others. Teachers have access to thousands of assessment items to create custom, technology-enhanced items that are fun, rigorous, and engaging.
“Now, teachers are back to instructional planning and moving forward, and not just searching for test items on Google. We have consistency across classrooms. Teachers are having conversations around planning assessments and data to drive instruction. Within our professional learning time (PLT), teachers use data to immediately talk about issues, engage with each other, and change instruction based on assessments.”
Saving teachers and administrators time
Interoperability is also saving Georgetown County School District teachers and administrators a lot of time. According to Johnson, “The convenience of having everything in one place keeps us from the agony of logging into as many as 18 different platforms with multiple passwords.”
For example, administering assessments is now much quicker. Planning tasks that once took an hour and a half with the previous solution have been trimmed to just 20 minutes.
With PowerSchool Enrollment, an online student registration management tool, staff is saving time because they no longer have to:
- Re-enter student data from handwritten forms from parents
- Spend time reviewing data manually or fixing errors
- Manage printing and distributing registration packets
“The process is so much faster, more convenient, and accurate now,” Johnson says. “We have staff who were doing menial data entry before. Now, because they don’t have to do that, they can spend their time helping make sense of the data. They are supporting instruction, not supporting data.”
Simplified, convenient, and accurate state reporting
With PowerSchool support and the ability to connect student data across products, Georgetown County School District has improved their state reporting, which is directly tied to their funding. State reporting is now automated and secure, according to Johnson. “Every penny counts when you are low funded and budgets are tight. PowerSchool has built-in audits when we submit reports, which is incredibly helpful.”
Georgetown uses Level Data, a PowerSchool partner,
for data validation. Data collected by schools and districts can come from many different sources, and the partnership with Level Data improves accuracy while providing information for school officials.
The district’s SIS data is updated nightly to the South Carolina Department of Education, ensuring it’s correct and current. For example, Georgetown runs their civil rights data reporting, a federal requirement, through PowerSchool. In their previous system this task took a single staff member 80 hours over 8 weeks for just one high school. With PowerSchool SIS’ reporting capabilities, it only takes 3-5 hours in one day.
“It’s really convenient, and it’s all built in,” Johnson says. “I’m doing zero exports for all of our funding data. I don’t have to reformat because everything is being run by PowerSchool.”
Families are more engaged in students’ education
PowerSchool helps inform and engage parents through real-time student performance updates and convenient communication tools. With an online parent portal and mobile app, families have convenient access to their students’ grades, attendance, assignments, and announcements, as well as a quick, easy tool to connect directly with teachers.
Johnson relates the power of family involvement from a story where she was with a parent recently. The parent logged into the parent portal for the first time.
“When the parent saw her child’s information, she said, ‘Oh wow, we really need to work on History.’ She was ready to have a conversation with her student. I know that impacts grades when parents actually know what their kids are doing. That’s huge. We are a district where many of our kids are in poverty, and parents aren’t always involved. We’ll take parent involvement whenever we can get it.”
Bringing it all together: the ‘‘backbone’’ of an education ecosystem
Through interoperability, Georgetown County School District no longer struggles with disconnected edtech products and siloed data. Instead, the district is using unified PowerSchool products that share data, inform instruction, save time, and allow them to expand their instructional capabilities.
“For our district, PowerSchool is the backbone of everything we do,” says Johnson. “It’s the foundation for everything, and it’s helping power our district to success.”