Power School: Fort Lee’s New Student Information System

Beginning this year, the Fort Lee School District will start using a new district-wide student information system (SIS) that will enable administrators, teachers and parents to more effectively monitor students.

At Monday’s Fort Lee Board of Education regular business meeting, Assistant Superintendent Steven Engravalle thanked district technology coordinator Jason Ruggiero—whom he previously said was “really instrumental in getting the system up and running”—for his tireless work in making Power School function for 2011.

Engravalle went on Monday to highlight several “bullet points” related to the district’s use of the new system:

• All parents K-12 will have access to the parent module, which can now be found at the top of not only the homepage of the school district’s website, but also on every school-specific page and via the “parents” tab on all pages. Previously only of students in grades 7-12 had such access through the old system, Genesis.
• Grades 3-12 will now receive numerical grades (with a scale corresponding to a letter grade)—no more A, B, C and D grades corresponding to descriptions such as “excellent,” “above average” and so on, and no longer the “standards-based” grades students in grades 3-6 previously received.
• Grades 1-2 will continue to receive standards-based grades, but in a separate interview with Patch, Engravalle said that’s something that will also change as the district “grows into the system,” and something he described as a “long-term goal.”
• Also new this school year is that kindergarten students will receive standards-based report cards, as opposed to the checklist they previously received. 
• The district will be hosting “parent nights” in every building for parents to learn more about Power School.
• The district will also be eliminating interim reports, previously issued at the middle and high schools, because parents will now be able to access their child’s grades in real time using Power School instead of waiting for the report to be generated, packaged and mailed out, by which time the information may no longer be accurate or relevant and potentially giving parents either a “false sense of security” or an unnecessary reason for concern.

“We have done—in the opinion of many folks that we work with in the development of Power School—more in the last four months than most people do in two years,” Engravalle told Patch, calling the system and all the information and data its able to handle, “the heart and soul of your district” and the school district’s “backbone.”

Engravalle recently provided an update on Power School, which was the subject of a Patch article in March.

Staff Training/Ongoing Support

On January 5, the district started what turned out to be a three-month initial implementation phase, which was completed by April 5. Two days later, a district-wide, online training program was launched for all staff. The training was tailored for specific roles. For example, secretaries were required to learn certain skills, while principals, teachers and others were required to learn separate, unique sets of skills. They can also go back for refreshers at any time throughout the year.

Engravalle said one of the main drawbacks of the Genesis system, which the school district used for more than 10 years, was that there was no such ongoing training, and there was “very sparse support.”

“With Power School, there’s constant training,” he said. “Most beneficial to our teachers is that there’s a section … called ‘mastery in minutes.’ If I’m a teacher or a secretary, and I forget how to enroll a student, I can watch a two-minute video opened in another window and remember how to do it. One-and-done professional development never works … you learn something by repetition, by doing it every day.”

Taking Attendance

“[Teachers] were still taking attendance by sending a little card to the office,” Engravalle said. “And where that’s ineffective is you have to send a student out of class, down a hall unattended. It’s a security issue; you’re missing learning time. Now they’re going to take attendance in about three seconds.”

Residency Issues

Power School is integrated with Google Maps, which is a useful tool for those who enroll students or monitor enrollment. Over the summer, school officials went through the tedious process of validating every address of every student currently enrolled in the district—well over 3,600 addresses—using the tool to ensure that they were legally enrolled.

“We found approximately 12 to 15 suspicious addresses, which were immediately sent to our residency officer, who is in the process of conducting investigations,” Engravalle said.

The Google Maps integration also makes enrolling students smoother because when the student’s street address is plugged in, the system tells the user if it’s a valid Fort Lee address and which school the child should be enrolled in based on the district boundaries Ruggiero worked hard to program into the system.

“It will actually not let you bring a student in if that address does not exist. It’ll red flag that kid,” Engravalle said, adding that there are always exceptions, such as special needs students who may have to be assigned to other schools based on their specific program needs.

Other New Developments

• Power School features photos of all enrolled students—something that will be helpful for staff in recognizing new students and creating seating charts with kids’ faces.
• When parents login to Power School and look at their child’s schedule, every name of a teacher will link to that teacher’s email.
• Daily and period attendance will be updated and therefore can be monitored by parents of high school students. Parents of elementary students can monitor their child’s homeroom attendance.
• Previously teachers could choose from just 28 “pre-canned” comments to include on report cards, but the new system allows customized comments in addition to the existing ones, enabling teachers to communicate student-specific information to parents. Engravalle likened the customized comments to tweets because there will be a character limit.
• School officials have imported into Power School all historical grades that were in the Genesis system. They also went through high school transcripts by hand in light of a recent grade scandal to verify that the transcript reflected the appropriate grade, credit and course for each student, starting with 12th-graders, who will need accurate transcripts to apply for college, and continuing through the rest of the high school grades.
• While the district has not yet started using the feature, Power School 7, the recently-released version of the program Fort Lee is using, features a language translation tool kit, allowing the “end user”—meaning the parent or teacher—to determine the language they would like to see the information displayed in.

“That’s going to be a big benefit to some of our parents and students who are not necessarily native English language learners,” Engravalle said. “We have not implemented that feature yet, but it is our understanding that that’s how it’s going to work.”

He also said that where Genesis was not customizable, Power School is, and that “there are so many nuances” to the system that can be customized.

“For [the new school year], we will be exactly where we were with Genesis for middle school and high school and a little further—meaning we’re going to have access to more information,” he said. “But they’re not going to miss a beat. If you want to be where you were when Genesis was here. It’s 100 percent. But I don’t want to be where Genesis was because that wasn’t effective for us.”

As Patch reported in March, Engravalle estimated that Power School would save the district $12,000 annually in licensing fees alone over Genesis, and that other factors could make the savings even more significant. More recently he reiterated his firm belief that with Power School, the district is “doing more with less.”

“In every municipality, every school district statewide, that’s the goal,” he said. “That’s what we have to do in very tough economic times. So we’re trying to streamline all processes in all areas so that we don’t decrease services; we increase services while decreasing the amount of administrative time and staff needed to conduct all these features.”