Launching a district data warehousing project

Insights on demand, just a click or two away

A data warehouse provides a secure location to house a broad array of data – from student demographics to individual test scores to summaries for AYP reporting. Our first initiatives focused on school improvement and rapid evaluation of programs.

Interactive reports with drill-down capabilities.
A walk-through of a sample course enrollment report would go something like this:

Choose a course from a pull-down menu to display a chart of course enrollment by teacher. Zoom in on one teacher to see she has 55 students and teaches Algebra 1. Let’s say the user knows from value-add reports that this teacher is faring poorly, so they look at her student performance.

Drill down to see which students are in her classes, click on or enter a student name, which provides a complete, detailed profile. Student achievement, test score data from grades three to 12, absences, discipline record – it’s all right there. There is no need to go to a file cabinet, or teacher, or data manager to get the information.

The same drill-down capabilities bring new value to the AYP report, which is now available for daily monitoring (or for a specific date range), not just for end-of-year reporting. A bar chart shows subgroups relative to the AYP threshold. Immediately an administrator can look at detail for subgroups. They can drill down to look more closely at an underperforming subgroup. By knowing where students are struggling, instruction choices can be made to help them meet AYP goals.

District wide student locator application

Previously, every school maintained its own roster of students. In a choice system, a child could have come from any number of schools. The district found elementary school kids were being dropped off at high schools. Administrators needed a way to quickly look up a phone number. What a simple concept – but with the previous data islands, it was very difficult.

We created a student locator, so any administrator across the system can pull up a list of all the kids, identify a student, drill down to see who he is living with, emergency contact information, etc, to get that child safely to where he needs to be.

That report is one of the most popular. It seems so simple, but it required compiling data across the system for 52,000 students.

There are plenty of opportunities ahead. The data team is expanding the repository of reports to support data-driven decision making, and using data integration tools to automate jobs for other recurring requests. Administrators are using these reports, and they’re hungry for more. By focusing on what decision makers need, we feel like we are a critical piece of making all of our students and schools successful.

Dr. Betty Weycker is the Assistant Superintendent for Technology for North Carolina’s Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School System . Dr. Weycker believes it is imperative that technology is utilized and embraced as a resource for both curriculum and data management/analysis. Development of a state of the art infrastructure for technology has been critical in her vision to leverage resources available and to align more opportunities for partnerships and collaboration with businesses, foundations, and other agencies.

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