How Iredell-Statesville Schools Is Using Data to Drive Conversations—and Student Success

Challenges

• Time wasted using spreadsheets and pivot tables to update and organize data for insights 
• Lack of staff visibility into data to make informed decisions 
• Disparate sources for student data with lack of visualizations 

Products & Solutions 

• PowerSchool Student Analytics
• PowerSchool SIS
• PowerSchool Enrollment 
• PowerSchool Predictive Enrollment Analytics

Results

• Clear data dashboards bringing essential student data together 
• Ability to have data-informed conversations to affect student success 
• Power to identify struggling students and make necessary adjustments to get them back on track
    

Just north of Charlotte, North Carolina, Iredell-Statesville Schools serves over 20,000 students from a blend of diverse communities. Students come from a mix of urban and suburban neighborhoods to rural family-run farms and multi-million-dollar homes scattered around Lake Norman.

The district has been a longtime leader in the advancement of using data. One challenge during that journey had been a struggle using disparate, outdated applications for inputting, updating, and organizing data. 

“Spreadsheets and pivot tables—that was me,” says Laura Elliott, Executive Director of Accountability, Testing, and Student Information. “Too much time was spent keeping up with spreadsheets, sharing them in Google Drive, and giving everybody rights so they could see the data.” 

Led by Elliott and Sherrard Martin, Iredell-Statesville Schools’ Director of Continuous Improvement, the district focused on modernizing their systems in its journey to continue building a data-driven culture. By doing so, they could better support teachers by providing them with tools that present data so that they can make meaningful—and informed—decisions to serve students.

To help extend their use of data, the district has partnered with PowerSchool to implement PowerSchool Student Analytics, an award-winning data analytics software solution that’s part of the Student Information Cloud. PowerSchool Analytics & Insights brings Iredell-Statesville Schools’ data together from multiple software products, presents it in clear, easy-to-read dashboards, and allows administrators and teachers to drill down deeper into any data sets. That gives them a comprehensive picture of individual students, classrooms, schools, and the entire district.

“[PowerSchool Analytics & Insights] increases efficiency and helps district and school administrators make decisions and focus on key objectives such as MTSS,” says Elliott.

Data in Action: The Ability to Gain Insights Quickly

In an example of how they’re using data positively, administrators recently discovered that they might not have been fully implementing behavior plans for certain Exceptional Children (EC) high school and middle school students. This meant that some students may not have a functional behavior analysis, which can help determine critical steps to get them back on track educationally.

The district quickly addressed the situation using data.

Martin was asked by Kelly Cooper, Chief Academic Officer of Secondary, to use Student Analytics, which allowed her to easily select at-risk students based on the number of their behavior incidents and then see the resulting disciplinary action.

Because of that quick data pull, “The chief academic officer of secondary and the EC executive director used the data to work with schools to improve supports for our most at-risk students. That’s now on everyone’s radar across the district about whether we’re appropriately and fully implementing behavior plans or beginning to take important steps to put behavior plans in place for both non-EC and EC students. This all came from this one simple report,” says Martin.

Ensuring Teachers Are Respected, Supported, Connected

The district has worked to ensure teachers feel respected, which can influence positive parent-teacher relationships. They are also ensuring teachers feel supported with robust learning systems and data, and that teachers feel connected to who and what they need to use the data to make meaningful decisions that impact student outcomes.

“We want to make sure that our teachers feel respected, and then they’ll be more respectful and can have more respectful parent-teacher interactions. Data is helping inform those conversations,” Martin says. “Teachers feel supported within their learning system using data. It’s our goal to use data and resources to connect teachers to what they need.” 

Using Data to Enable Better, More Effective Conversations

Iredell-Statesville Schools’ middle and high school Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) coordinators and the Secondary Director of Curriculum and MTSS, Jim Worthington, are using data to look at students’ attendance, behavior, and grades. The goal is to improve their ability to determine which students needed additional support.

“We work with them to pull data out of [Analytics & Insights] to identify the effectiveness of our general academic and core plans, and we’re using it to identify at-risk students for possible Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions,” says Worthington.

This information is also shared with school leadership and has become a focus in monthly principal meetings at the district and quarterly one-on-one “data meetings” between principals and Cooper.

“They are realizing the ease of finding information and useful data has enabled them to spend more time looking at students individually and determining the best course of support. Having site coordinators and individual teachers as part of the data team has allowed a clearer picture of the ‘why’ and that’s resulted in a more effective plan for addressing students’ gaps in a more individualized and personalized way within a Multi-Tiered System of Supports,” says Worthington.

“They’re really diving into this data that’s all coming directly from PowerSchool and seeing it all in one place in a very user-friendly dashboard,” says Martin.

One more way the district is using data to drive informed conversations is by using heat maps in [Analytics & Insights] to see dynamic enrollment data. That way, they have the necessary data to discuss the possibility of re-drawing district lines and adding new schools based on population trends.   

Dashboards Bring Multiple Data Points into One View

With [Analytics & Insights], the district can see data from all its critical software programs—including its student information system, learning management system, assessment, and behavior programs—in one clear dashboard. 

“I love that everything from PowerSchool goes into [Analytics & Insights], and we can see wonderful dashboards,” says Elliott. “A principal, administrator, or counselor can log in and easily find their at-risk attendance students or at-risk behavior students. They can see all of their grades, build a group of students based on multiple criteria, and pull it all together to see whatever data they want or need to see.” 

Iredell Statesville Schools is also using dashboards to see data showing a teacher analysis. Principals can use the dashboard to see how teachers are grading, noting if teachers are possibly grading too hard or too easy. 

“It’s probably one of the more powerful dashboards we have, and principals are diving into this data,” says Martin. “It can show a scenario like when students make all A’s in a class but fail the EOG or EOC assessments. Or they’re not doing well on AP exams or another high-stakes test. That allows us to connect those teachers to better professional development or have different conversations with them to find out what’s happening.”

Data Insights Empower the District’s Ability to Serve Students Better  

Iredell-Statesville Schools has embraced a strong data culture within its staff to use the power of information to educate its students better. Through the ability to pull multiple data types, including grades and scores, attendance, and behavior, they’ve gained the ability to see the whole child. And to also identify when a student is struggling in real time and make quick adjustments to get them back on track.