Power School to Streamline Student Management, Save School District Money

Starting in September, the Fort Lee School District will start using a new district-wide student information system that will enable administrators, teachers and parents to more effectively monitor students. It’s also going to save the school district money.

Assistant Superintendent Steven Engravalle estimates Power School will save the district $12,000 annually in licensing fees alone over Genesis, the current system, which the district has been using for about the past 11 years, and that’s before you start factoring in preparing and mailing out report cards.

But what is Power School, and what can it do?

“Any information that we would collect on a child is collected, and sorted, and managed through Power School,” Engravalle said. “As an example, if I want to know information about special education classifications to collect the data for state school aid, which is called the ASSA, all of that would be contained in there.”

In addition, Power School will contain health information, Individualized Education Program (IEP) information if applicable, test result information, other grading information, free and reduced lunch status or even any kind of charges students might owe, such as the high school activity fee, among other data.

“As I look up a student, I’ll be able to tell if there’s any type of health concern, or I’ll be able to review a health history,” Engravalle said. “Or I’ll be able to review an IEP for the child. So really, I can get a whole picture. Education is about knowing your students. And what this does for us is it creates a database of all the information we need on the student.”

Not every user will have the same level of access to information. Engravalle said teachers, for example, won’t necessarily have access to certain student data based on confidentiality rights, such as HIPAA laws.

“As a principal, I would have access because I’m sworn to be confidential based on my position,” Engravalle said.

At the high school level, Power School will allow also not only administrators, but teachers and parents to track a child’s progress toward graduation—whether they need to take X amount of Math or English classes, World Languages, community service credits, and so on, to fulfill graduation requirements.

“Information is power,” Engravalle said. “So we’re hopeful we can make better decisions with the increased amount of data to maximize the services we provide to children and to maximize the use of the resources that we have.”

And resources are diminishing. This year alone, Engravalle pointed out, “We had to cut upwards of [$1.5 million] out of our budget.”

In addition to the litany of enhanced features for parents, Engravalle said Power School, which he called “a much more robust system than (Genesis),” will be used for grades K through 12, as opposed to just at the middle and high school levels.

“K to 6 parents whereas otherwise are left out at this present time, will now be included,” Engravalle said. “They’ll have a lot of information at their fingertips.”

That information includes access to their children’s grades, although Engravalle noted that the district is still trying to determine how the district is going to make that work for K through second graders, who aren’t graded on an A, B, C and D scale.

“But we’ll make it work,” he said.

Another feature Engravalle highlighted about the Power School system is its ability to translate pages.

“We’ll be able to make pages in Korean, pages in Japanese, pages in Spanish, so that when the parents login, if that’s their language of choice, if that’s what they can read, they will be able to see that parent portal in their native language,” he said. “I’m sure we do have users who don’t use the Genesis module because they don’t understand it.”

A longer-term but related goal is creating translated report cards.

“We would like to have report cards available for some parents in Korean, in Japanese, in Hebrew if need be,” Engravalle said. “The overall goal is to increase the communication with parents. Parents are part of the educational process. And we need to connect with them. And we need to meet the parents where they are. The parents don’t need to meet us where we are.”

He also said interim reports may ultimately become a thing of the past.

“Because while some parents may like to have them, we can say to them, listen, you can take a snapshot any time you want and print out your child’s grades. With interims, by the time we collect the data, send it home to the parents, they open it up and read it, the child has had three or four more tests. So either their grade has gone up or their grade has gone down. So they’re not even reading accurate data,” Engravalle said.

On streamlining the education process for teachers, Engravalle said:

“Teachers have enough to do. I want to be able to say to the teachers, ‘listen, I want to take this off your plate,’ especially for K to 6 teachers. They have enough to deal with, especially with our increased class sizes, our diverse population, our teachers work hard.”

Engravalle, who’s currently working on his third implementation of the system dating back to his work with other school districts he’s worked for, called Fort Lee’s an “aggressive timeline,” but adds that “we are ahead of schedule.”

Data input should be done by April 5, and then administrators can begin framing out the master schedule, enrolling kids in classes and start developing elementary report cards and standards.

“[We’re] doing all of this concurrently,” Engravalle said.  “Some schools take up to two years to do this.”

Training for teachers and guidance counselors is already underway, both in-person with trainers at the local schools and self-directed online.

The district will also provide ongoing support through its technology department, trainers and administrators who act as trainers, including Engravalle himself, developing how-to guides and dedicating a staff member “to really becoming a guru of Power School,”—something that wasn’t the case in the past, according to Engravalle.

“We’re going to again meet our teachers where they are,” Engravalle said. “And as a district we’re going to be sensitive to them too. While our expectations are going to be high, we’re not going to just train you once and walk away.”

Engravalle said he expects Power School to be fully operational and in use on the first day of the new school year in September with no interruption of services to parents or teachers.

“At the minimum, we’re looking to have an introduction for all of our teachers no later than the last day of school, so that they can at least feel comfortable with what they’ve seen,” Engravalle said. “And then, as we welcome them back in September, we will incorporate some first day or two training. Early expectations will be to take attendance and enter grades into system. But we are going to ask [parents] for their patience in the first few months. We are learning too, so please don’t expect the exact same level of expertise of the teachers of the previous system. But I can tell you that they will pick it up very quickly.”