Student Information Systems

Bedford County Schools Streamlines Student Enrollment, Data Collection

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 11/12/14

Bedford County Public Schools, with approximately 10,300 students, has adopted a new tool in an effort to more uniformly capture and manage student data across district schools.

The district was distributing and then collecting 15-20 forms to each student. The large volume of paperwork generated by enrollment and registration kept administrators working through December just to update the student information system (SIS) with the new data.

A Pearson PowerSchool SIS user, the district decided to adopt InfoSnap, one of Pearson's independent software vendors, to help streamline its student enrollment and registration processes.

"Factoring in the cost of labor resources, paper and ink, our InfoSnap solution saves us an average of $82,000 per year," said Kevin Harrison, data manager at Bedford, in a prepared statement. "If you analyze the time that staff would previously spend on printing 154,000-plus sheets of paper, following up with families and manually processing and polishing student data, it came at a significant cost to our school district."

The district also used the PowerSchool API to eliminate the need for administrators to sign into InfoSnap, approve a student record, create a download file and upload it to PowerSchool, combining the whole process into a single step. Bedford also used the API to create custom fields in PowerSchool, such as photo release forms and student medical conditions.

"The simplicity of the API is incredible — it's as simple as pushing a button. What also impresses me is that I have the ability to create an unlimited number of new fields and implement them as part of my InfoSnap solution," added Harrison. "We place a call to our solution specialist and it's done within minutes, so that our school staff can track additional data."

"Working with the InfoSnap team to implement the PowerSchool API was a huge success and the smoothest roll-out I've ever had for an API," said Harrison. "Everything from start to finish was effortless, because InfoSnap took care of us."