| State: New Jersey | Number of Students: 1,368 |
| School Type: Charter Management Organization | Free and Reduced Lunch: N/A |
| Grade Level: PK-12 | English Language Learners: N/A |
School Context
This is a highly influential charter school network of schools that supports schools across multiple states. They focus on developing a personalized learning model that utilizes adaptive playlists and student agency. They have also built their own learning management system and consult with other organizations to adopt their model across the country.
State of Technology
This network of charter schools likes to be data driven, so tracking basic data around attendance and behavior is really important. It is important for they to be able to reward great behavior, acknowledge when a student is struggling with good behavior and take action on that data. They also think that attendance is a really critical part of that data. They think that if teachers and school leaders have this data at their fingertips they can make smarter decisions about how they support students.
Currently, they use two models for thinking about behavior management, Positive Behavior Incentive Systems and Champs. To track the merits, demerits and attendance record for each student, they use Kickboard. While Kickboard does a good job to help teachers record behavior, it does not give data back in the right ways. It shares data reports as logs, but then they have to spend a lot of time cleaning and organizing the data so we can push it into a data warehouse and then into a data dashboard. This complication makes it really easy to take actions based on the data.
Tech Needs & Requirements
The network would like give teachers a tool to track attendance and behavior in one place. For behavior, teachers should be able to do track positive behavior and track infractions. Teachers should easily be able to do quick data entry and note what behavior students exhibit and then follow up later with detailed notes so the Director of Culture or Dean of Students can follow up and resolve the issue. The teacher should be able to assign points to each type of behavior, through customization and name the types of behaviors that can be quickly recorded. Also, the teacher would be able to assign an action to a specific behavior, such as send to the principal or call parents later (this would be a nice to have, but not non negotiable). For attendance, they would like to be able to do the following: track attendance records; associate a student with a parent name and contact; pull those contacts easily within the program for quick action; and display average attendance for the day/week/month/year. They are very goal oriented, so it is important to be able to see those metrics and track them. For reporting, they would like the ability to set some rules up in the system that would create a list of students or flag a student if a certain number of consecutive behaviors or tardees were displayed. That way administrators could easily triage both good and bad behavior. A parent dashboard or portal would be helpful, but not critical. A messaging or email component to share attendance or behavior issues would be fantastic, but not critical.
Students need some transparency around what is happening and what teachers are saying. They should be able to see their own data so that they can reflect on it and have a deeper conversation with parents or teachers. Having a student portal is important.
Teachers should be able to quickly capture data and then be armed with their notes on what happened later on so that they have data to support conversations with parents.
The tool must be able to track both attendance and behavior, must have a reports builder so we can display data and export data usefully, must be able to export data as a CSV, must be able to customize behavior labels and points assigned to each behavior, and must allow multiple adults and stakeholders to leave notes and assign merit/demerit for student behavior. The network provides students with 1:1 Chromebooks. The network wants to see data that shows real time records of who needs immediate intervention, who is a repeatedly showing certain behavior and needs support and who is qualified as truant because of attendance habits. We also need to see data that shows the correlation between these different aspects. Ideally, they would be able to have a report builder that is intuitive and friendly and allows us to dive into the correlation between different data points. CSV exporting is a non negotiable. It would be great if they could schedule automated exports so they could sync it into the data warehouse. If the tool integrated with the SIS (Powerschool and MySTAR) that would be a huge plus. It would also be good if the system has an API so they could pull the data hourly into their own data warehouse and then onto their data dashboard they are designing. That would be nice to have, but not a non negotiable. The tool must operate on Chromebooks and export CSV files.