Page 100 - Lakeland Catholic Technology Plan

4. Student Records
The District, after much exhaustive research has installed the SASI-XP program as their software of choice for maintaining student records. Like Athena, SASI was implemented for September 1998. (Note: It takes a lot of guts to start both a Li- brary automation system, and a student records system at the same time. Very few people are able to pull off a project as large as this, and this was definitely an- other success) having each school use the same software is very advantageous. It means that there is only one student records system to maintain, there is no worry about transferring records from one school to another, and keeping records at the central office level is relatively easy. Integrade Pro is the marks software package that is used by teachers to generate marks, and merge with the SASI database.
However, the Director of Technology Services has assumed all support and train- ing for the SASI project. This means that he spends around 90% of his day provid- ing support, training users, and performing the necessary updates and changes to each school’s SASI product as required. The theory is that once the schools are at the point where they can take care of themselves and updates, his workload will diminish. The Director of Technology Services has a wealth of experience in the areas of student records, school administration, and technology, however he is a very expensive software support person.
Without going into much detail until later in this document, the best job descrip- tion for a Director of Technology does not include doing all the service and sup- port for the student records system. The District would be spending their money more wisely if they were to hire a person exclusively for this task, and this person wouldn’t cost near as much as the Director of Technology Services.
Recommendation:
1. A full-time position should be created to manage the service, support, maintenance, and upgrades of the SASI program. Over time this
person may move into a part-time position, or have other duties at
the Central Office.
5. Report Cards
One of the issues that has arisen, since the implementation of the SASI soft- ware, is report cards. The High Schools and the Middle School do not like the SASI report cards. Apparently the layout is not acceptable, and it can’t be modi- fied. Considerable time and effort has been spent trying to export the data out of SASI and into another product for report generation. This in itself has produced much difficulty.
At the Elementary level, an Elementary Report Card Committee met and created an ideal report card, as a template in WordPerfect. A programmer has been contracted to build a report card for the elementary schools based on the design developed by the Elementary Report Card Committee.
At the High School level, a contractor has been hired to create a Microsoft Access Database as the front end for the report cards. This front end would be highly customized and able to generate a better looking report card. However, a large amount of money is being spent attempting to “reinvent the wheel.” The Dis- trict is spending a large sum of money on this highly customized report card, and, if any changes or modifications need to be made, they will need to return to the contractor and pay for any changes/updates. Virtually every school in the Prov- ince, if not the country does report cards. And a large majority of them do it elec- tronically. The District could potentially save a lot of money by simply “networking” with other School Districts. In many cases a basic report template may be ob- tained at no cost, with only minor modifications needed to make it work.
In fact there are a number of good reporting products available utilizing the range of applications from low-end databases to high-end client-server products.
Note: The issue here is not that SASI won’t generate a report card, the issue is that the report card generated by SASI, in the opinion of the users, has a poor re- port card layout, and it can’t be changed.
The ultimate end-goal here should be a standard report card. For example, one standard for K-8 and another standard for 9-12.
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