We often begin our school budget training for charter applicants by asking the group to identify the major levers that impact total teacher salary expenses. Almost without fail, the two answers given are 1) teacher salary levels and 2) average class size. What most people overlook is that there is a third, equally important lever: 3) schedule configuration.
The Student Information System (SIS) serves as a school’s database of enrolled students, their attendance, class schedules, parents and emergency contacts, and often much, much more. The SIS is like a school’s brain – critical to its ongoing functioning – and so adopting or switching to a new one is no small decision. Although needs vary between schools, some basic considerations apply across the board. This post aims to familiarize you with some of the main questions to ask yourself (and prospective vendors) before making a decision.
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As many school administrators and staff already know, approximately 90% of funding received by schools is driven by enrollment. Student recruitment can drive enrollment, and thus has a significant impact on the financial stability of your school.
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Building on our data experience with schools, we have compiled best practices for managing the communication and wider dissemination of state test results across critical internal stakeholders.
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Attendance and absenteeism are continuous educational challenges. However, before schools can effectively address absenteeism and improve their attendance rate, it is critical to understand common factors that can impact the students they serve.
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As more and more data is made available to educators, data dashboards are increasingly hailed as one-stop, silver bullet solutions to school problems. Despite investing money and staff time into data visualization software and dashboard development, end-users (principals, instructional coaches, and teachers) often don’t find the information useful. We believe that dashboards are not a solution on their own. It’s the analysis and communication of the data that makes it useful to educators and directs their time, passion and attention.
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Accurate enrollment records are critical not only for building a clear picture of school demographics and student mobility, but also for ensuring receipt of appropriate funding. Consistently using entry and exit codes are key aspects of maintaining accurate student enrollment records.
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Revenue from annual student enrollment typically makes up 75% to 95% of a school’s budget, so hitting enrollment targets each year is critical. To ensure all parties are able to make key decisions and help the school stay on track, it is important to maintain an open and clear line of communication between Executive, Finance, Student Data, and Operational personnel.
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From our conversations with school leaders, we know that state report cards can be challenging to tackle, especially as the school year comes to a close. We wanted to better understand how report card scores fluctuate over time, so we did some digging into trends over the last few years using the District of Columbia’s Performance Management Framework (PMF) as an example.
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Teachers and administrators need access to high-quality student data to make instructional and intervention decisions. However, getting access to this data can be a challenge in the face of staff turnover, the large number of data systems, the high volume of external data requests, and the lack of coordination among different teams.
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