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Day to Day Data
One of the key frustrations of 21st century educators is the constant demand for data. The curriculum coordinator wants data, the superintendent wants data, the school board wants data, the state wants...
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Day to Day Data: Adding a Pinch of Salt
Much of the data collected and stored in your assortment of databases and data warehouses is worthless. If that data had physical presence, and could be heaped up in piles instead of neatly organized...
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Consolidation, KPIs, Efficiency – then what?
Recently, the Lake Placid News ran an article reporting that two small districts in upstate New York – Lake Placid and Saranac Lake – were going to explore options for funding a consolidation study. A...
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Measuring the Value that Teachers Contribute to their Classrooms
There is a strong trend in education to strengthen the way that teacher performance is evaluated. In most states, this usually means evaluating teachers on the performance of their students....
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Challenging the Status Quo Pays Big Rewards for One Vermont School District
“In government, as in most realms of life, we find it safer and easier to do what we’ve always done, simply because we’ve always done it. Only on rare occasions, usually at times of crisis, do we step...
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Improve Efficiency by Using Every Feature of Your SIS
When you work at a school district, every day you hear about the need to be more efficient. As a public servant, you not only have pressure from within the organization to do more with less, you also...
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The Benefits of Online Communities
We have all heard the saying “It takes a village to raise a child”. We all know how important and true this is. It takes the home, school, community centers, family, friends, and neighbors to raise our...
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After Breakfast: Cleaning Up and Your Data Migration
In a previous post, starting your day with a healthy breakfast was used as an analogy for planning a SIS implementation. Well, I want to discuss what comes after having that nutritious breakfast (and...
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SIS Confidentiality Training for New Staff
The start of a new school year typically brings new staff to buildings. During my recent travels across the country to visit with customers, it became very evident to me that many districts are...
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A New Way to Measure At-Risk Students
What determines if a student is at risk? How can this be measured? What is the meaning of “At Risk”? These same questions are asked by school districts across the United States every day, but the...
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Trending: Mobile Devices in School Districts
Tablets and smart phones are quickly replacing desktops and laptops as the device of choice to access information and conduct business. It is just a matter of time before mobile devices are the...
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Successfully Introducing GPS: Tales From the Road
In my first post for this blog, I told the story of one Tyler transportation client who used GPS software and hardware to help protect their drivers. Here’s another great story I recently heard from a...
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Key Performance Indicators: A Check Engine Light For Your Business
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tells us that: “OBD stands for On-Board Diagnostics, a computer-based system built into all model year 1996 and newer light-duty cars and trucks. OBD monitors...
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Going Mobile
What does mobile mean to you? The answer to that question very likely depends on how old you are. I got my first PC at work twenty five years ago and still clearly remember my first email. I’ve been...
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Budgeting for Outcomes
As budgets these days tighten and the public’s scrutiny mounts, traditional budgeting, which focuses on costs rather than results, no longer works. When you budget for costs, you get more of them. What...
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Information-Based Decision Making: Part One
A lot has been said and written supporting the concept of data driven decision making. But far less has been published about how decision makers actually get from raw data to a final, real-life...
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Information-Based Decision Making: Part Two
I remember reading a study performed three years ago by US News and World Report where they evaluated the thirty largest industries in the US and discussed how each performed their business functions....
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From KPIs to Benchmarking to Best Practices
As responsible school business officials, we know how important it is to be completely certain that our district operations are well managed. To do so we must constantly ask ourselves questions such...
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Cycling Through the School Year
The school year is a well defined cycle consisting of phases: planning, startup, maintenance and close out. One of the very interesting characteristics of life as a K-12 professional is the way our...
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To Be or Not to Be a Project? Part One
School districts are often faced with numerous tasks which must be carried out over significant periods of time, some accomplished throughout the year and some even carrying over several years. In this...
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