Client: Ypsilanti Public School District Title: 3H’s Enterprise Information Integration (EII) solution eSnap™ improves productivity by providing new access to valuable K-12 educational intelligence. (PDF)

CHALLENGE

The Ypsilanti Public School District in Michigan has a staff of approximately 750 teachers, support staff and administrators and provides educational programs to 4,665 students in preschool through grade twelve.

Vital information, such as student assessments, student disciplinary data, historical trends and transactional data is managed in multiple physical locations. Applications run on different databases, including MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server; on different platforms, such as Windows and Unix; and use different interfaces for data access and reporting from web-based and mainframe applications. This environment slows connectivity from the disparate data locations to the public school’s central location.

Having multiple IT administrators, collaborators and systems throughout Ypsilanti Public Schools makes information difficult to share, causes redundancies and prevents educators from seeing the big picture.

In addition, to achieve the accountability mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, the school district needed to integrate access to their legacy application and third-party information sources, and compile student and assessment information. The top challenges were:

• Difficulty integrating numerous software systems at decentralized locations
• Dependence on external knowledge and data sources
• Different interfaces for data access and reporting using various applications
• The need for customized views for different roles and stakeholders
• Lack of infrastructure interoperability, scalability and security

3H SOLUTION

3H Technology (3H) began with a needs assessment analysis for the Ypsilanti Public School District and a thorough review of the existing systems. After identifying the organization’s needs and prioritizing reporting requirements, 3H implemented its Enterprise Information Integration solution eSnap™ to facilitate easy access to information from a variety of data sources.

3H factored the commonality between the data sources and identified the “Student” and “Teacher” entities as the core business data elements. 3H built the user views or Snapins to display the necessary information from the various data sources based upon these key data elements. The views enabled authorized users, based on their roles, to look up student information such as proficiencies, test scores, grades, attendance.

The Snapins created reporting tools to enable the district to comply with government metrics for No Child Left Behind including Disciplinary Profiles, General Student Information, MEAP Assessment data and MIT (Missed Instructional Time) information. Each of the Snapins allows users to group different data versions and sort results by building location, grade, infraction, or other criteria.

RESULTS

Ypsilanti Public School District users have access to the information they need in a timely and efficient manner. District productivity has increased by centralizing and streamlining data flow and data management. Data retrieval and reporting can now be performed in minutes because everything is in one place. Users have the ability to bypass the "middle man", go straight to the data source, and tap directly and non-intrusively into all the backend databases.

3H has helped the Ypsilanti School District generate the reports needed to provide stakeholders access to valuable educational intelligence, helping them discover hidden relationships and bring to light any current deficiencies.