Instant Access to Data Gives Schools New Power

The COVID-19 pandemic has school districts across the country reevaluating their approach to learning and engagement. Coupled with drastic funding cuts and an uncertain future for the return to in-person learning, the need for quick-access information is more critical than ever. Trying to build a strategic approach that maximizes resources and nurtures academic achievement is more important than ever before, and fingertip access to actionable information is the key to executing that plan!

Districts across the country have long struggled with the ways they extract and analyze data in PowerSchool. Level Data, a leader and innovator in EdTech managed services and a PowerSchool premier partner, developed RealTime Reports to enhance the ability of schools to access and understand complex data about their students and staff.

“The needs of schools have changed dramatically in recent years”, said Matt Betts, President and founder of Level Data. “It’s not enough for districts to simply have detailed information about their students. Departments throughout a district – from the lunchroom and attendance office all the way up to the district finance office – are depending on live-time information to make informed decisions like never before.”

The coronavirus crisis is impacting districts large and small in the form of unprecedented budget cuts, translating into increased pressure on administration and staff to do more with less while stretching resources and funding as far as possible. Too many schools that were previously trying to make-due and get by are now left scrambling.

According to Al Momrik, a longtime Level Data employee and former district systems administrator, trying to manage data with traditional data pulls and spreadsheet extractions takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort – time and effort that many districts simply don’t have. The pressure districts are under during this pandemic is unrivaled and compounded by the ever-increasing complexity of state and federal reporting submissions, including the CRDC.

Extracting information out of a district’s PowerSchool SIS can now be done in a matter of minutes instead of hours or days. The input of over 100 school districts was instrumental in developing the platform, guiding the creation of a series of flexible reporting modules that return tremendous value to districts.

The newest module is the Lunch Status report, a simple tool that districts can use to improve streams of funding using student-lunch data. Returning results according to a home address, the Lunch Status report shines a light on students who qualify for low and no-cost meals programs but with inaccurate lunch status information. With this data in-hand districts can improve the delivery of services to students and enhance valuable streams of revenue at year’s end, including title-based funds and USF opportunities.

Never before have schools had the ability to extract, tailor, and analyze data contained within their databases so instantly or so easily. With decentralized access to usable data, departments throughout a district can easily access the details most valuable to them. Most importantly, users don’t need to pursue advanced training or specialized certification to effectively use RealTime Reports – when previewed at several major EdTech conferences in the Autumn of 2019, most first-time users were navigating the platform successfully in less than a minute!

“We built this to make finding and using data easy. We never could have imagined that schools would be hit by a pandemic and a recession when RealTime Reports was first launched”, Matt Betts said. “We’ve had more raves from current customers and requests from potential customers because of the hard times we’re in, though. Schools are looking for anything that can give them an edge, and when schools do well their students reap the rewards. At the end of the day, that’s what drives us as a company.”

Learn more about RealTime Reports by visiting leveldata.com/realtime-reports