August 2004 — Applications
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Database System Helps Keep Everyone Informed in Rural Vermont School District
Tracking the progress of individual students and finding ways to improve their educational experience are constant challenges for all schools. But in rural Vermont, the distance between schools can compound the problem of quick and effective communications. At Addison Northwest Supervisory Union, an educational management system built on FileMaker Pro database software helps keep everyone informed. By using the database, teachers stay close to the performance of students, while administrators keep an eye on progress toward school, district and statewide achievement goals.
Analyzing Data
In the past, teachers used a paper-based system that worked well for individual teachers, but posed a problem when it came time to analyze the data on a districtwide basis. When we built the database, FileMaker Pro let us design the user interface so it mirrored the paper-based system that was familiar to our teachers. This greatly smoothed teacher adoption and allowed us to quickly begin tracking results. With all data now housed in a central location, we are able to deliver different strata of data based on the unique needs of each group. For example:
- Administrators prefer to analyze data from district to district within the state or from school to school within a district.
- Principals prefer to analyze data from classroom to classroom within a grade.
- Teachers prefer to analyze data from student to student within a class.
- Parents prefer to analyze data from child to other children (within one school or across the district).
The system is designed to work first at the classroom level — to keep the focus on getting information in the hands of the teacher — where it will have the most impact on educating children. Teachers can print reports from the database at any time, which helps them identify groups of children who may need similar kinds of attention. This ability to print reports also lets teachers tailor their lessons in order to have the most efficiency in the classroom and the most impact on each child.
Providing Online Access
The entire system is housed on a Citrix server, so despite the distance, teachers and administrators can access the data remotely over the Internet. This is important in a region where most of the outlining area is rural farmland. Within this district, we have three elementary schools, one high school and one administration building serving a population of 1,300 students spread across five towns: Addison, Ferrisburg, Panton, Vergennes and Waltham. Again, our database was designed to reflect the use model already in place with the teachers. In this case, teachers were accustomed to taking paperwork home; however, we made it so they can now access the same forms over the Internet. In the future, we will add Internet access for parents as well. So even if they live in remote, rural settings, parents still will be able to view the progress of their child at any time throughout the year.
We also will be correlating information in the database with actual report cards. When report cards are tied into the database, parents will be able to not only see how their child is performing at any time, but they will also be able to compare their child's performance to other students in the same class or district. Naturally, we will modify the language on the report cards to be more parent-friendly since some of the terms in the profiles are designed for professional educators, and may be nonintuitive to many parents.
