Monday, August 25, 2014

Setting up Missing Core Courses Report in Schedule Analysis

Several people (thanks Jodi, Mike, Patricia and Samantha) have suggested that Missing Core Courses Report will be more effective if there was a way to configure the courses required by grade levels.

Now, there is way (see screenshots below). You can choose which courses are required for each grade level and Schedule Analysis will honor your selection when determining which students are missing one or more Core courses for the grade level they are enrolled in. This setup page is available in FteTrack setup menu.

This is how you can update your FteTrack installation files, or, let you know if we can help.

Pic1


Pic 2

Thursday, August 14, 2014

CRDC Track

The 2013-14 CRDC will collect information about the 2013–14 school year from a universe of every public school district and school.

The following statement for this document on ED website for CRDC made me chuckle though:

 Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 14.2 hours per school survey response and 4.2 hours per local educational agency (LEA) survey response, including time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information.
Are they kidding or just ignorant?

I have known school districts during the last CRDC reporting cycle (2011-12) where they had 3-4 people working full-time for months to be able to compile this massive dataset for all of their school and they had 12 schools.

Anyway, based on the guidelines from OCR website, we can conclude that most of the data elements ( > 80% ) at school level (both Part 1 & 2) can be easily derived from the existing FTE and Student Record datasets that each school district in Georgia already reports to the state.

The way this application works is, you load your October 2013 FTE file (for Enrollments) and 2013-14 Student Record files (for Course & Discipline related data elements). The application pre-fills forms for individual schools with more than 80% of data fields already filled in. Data elements that are not part of either FTE or SR data collection can be manually entered and saved into the form for each school.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Generating GHSA Form A directly from your SIS database

This application is Desktop java application that pulls data directly from Student Information System database (Powerschool and Infinite Campus only at this time), so, you will need the necessary information like your database server name/ip address, port etc.

Since this is a java application, you will need Java run-time environment 7 (JRE 7).

You want to download this file and just double click on the “jar” file, if you have the correct version of JRE installed, you should see the following screen.

Pic 1
If the connection to the PS database is successful, you will see a screen like the following with your High School names:

Pic 2
Pressing on the two buttons above will print the appropriate reports (one PDF per High School) in the same folder where you downloaded the “jar” file.