For several years it had been a goal of Houston County, located in central Georgia, to provide a simpler way to leverage a wide variety of information to monitor and evaluate a student’s progress. This included state and locally administered tests as well as demographic data. Like other larger school districts, HCBOE was using multiple operating platforms, in this instance IBM and Microsoft, to support their technology needs. This environment complicated and inhibited their use of information to measure and analyze why a student may or may not be achieving their best. They needed a new system.

There were several important considerations:

• Giving both administrators and teachers reports that provided a simple way to evaluate a student’s progress against a variety of variables.
• Architecting a solution that could be easily modified if the source information were to change.
• Having a secured Intranet portal as the delivery vehicle for reporting.
• Establishing a technology platform that was current, substantive, and could be easily interfaced to other applications.
• Building an Operational Data Store (ODS) that could be kept current daily by extracting information from a larger Data Warehouse.
• Implementing a solution that could be maintained by HCBOE staff.

After evaluating several alternatives, HCBOE decided that MOSS 2007, Microsoft’s latest version of their SharePoint portal product, would be the ideal platform through which to access the reports. The reporting dashboard would be built using Microsoft’s SQL Server tools, SSRS and SSAS.

B2B Technologies, a Microsoft Gold Partner and a Microsoft Certified Education Partner was selected to work with the school district for this leading-edge project. With a long history of implementing portal solutions in the education space, B2B had been familiar with the new MOSS 2007 application even before it was released commercially.

Designing a single reporting dashboard that can provide user-centric, multi-purposed information can be a big challenge. Although there are a variety of analytical applications that are commercially available, for most administrators and teachers they are far too complex for everyday use.

Always with their students in mind, the Houston County Board of Education wanted the most robust reporting system they could afford, now and into the future. Not only was working within current budgetary constraints important, but they wanted to minimize ongoing expenditures for technical support and user training. Their consulting partner, B2B Technologies, was able to advise Houston School officials of the best approach to reach those objectives. In approximately 5 months, the first version of the new BI and DW application was released.

The new dashboard application provides visibility through the SharePoint portal all the way from the District level down to the individual classroom and student data; easily accessible from any web connection with proper security authorization. Information “rolls up” from reports for the individual student, to the classroom, then to the course, next to the school, and finally to the whole school district.

According to Houston County School officials they are now able to answer questions such as, “Does a student need to be shifted to another class level because they are struggling in certain academic areas? Are some instructors less effective in teaching certain subject curriculum? Are there overall trends within a school that indicate either a need for improvement or are there unique variations within the student population demographics?” The dashboard reports will grow in value as yearly student information is added resulting in historical tracking.

Wally Reeves, the Executive Director of Information Technology for HCBOE, believes the design of this application can be of value to any school district and is well worth investigating.