Prince George's County Public Schools Upgrades SIS to Better Manage Communications, Data

After an exhaustive search to replace its 15-year-old student information system, Prince George's County Public Schools (PGCPS) in Maryland, one of the largest K–12 school districts in the U.S., chose Edupoint Educational Systems' Synergy Education Platform to replace its aging student information system and meet several other needs.

The new Synergy platform will replace PGCPS's 15-year-old SIS and also add Synergy's Online Registration, MTSS, and Analytics, to be hosted in Synergy's AWS Cloud environment.

PGCPS said it went through an extensive research and review process of several systems, finally choosing three into which to take a deep dive. The district's IT team evaluated the systems' core functionality. Then a stakeholder group of 60 parents, students, teachers, secretaries, principals, IT staff, and other central office department leaders attended a demo day to rate the three platforms. Finally, schedulers from five middle and high schools, along with 23 staff from various district areas, evaluated the systems for scheduling, data analysis, and reporting.

Synergy emerged as the top choice.

"With Synergy, PGCPS will get a state-of-the-art platform capable of meeting the varied needs of the district's broad user base while keeping pace with advancements and innovations within the district and in K-12 public education more generally," Edupoint said. Synergy includes powerful tools that facilitate convenient communication districtwide, including between schools and with parents and students. The MTSS module will allow teachers and interventionists to access all student data in one place, eliminating the need to log into an additional system to access SIS data."

Edupoint said that its Synergy platform "is unique among K-12 student data management solutions in providing an array of role-based mobile apps designed to give all stakeholders access to the tools they need when and where they need them. More than 5.5 million students use Synergy in 22 states."

Visit the Synergy platform page to learn more about its features.

About the Author

Kate Lucariello is a former newspaper editor, EAST Lab high school teacher and college English teacher.

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