Prospect Hill Academy Charter School is a college preparatory public charter school serving grades K-12 in Cambridge and Somerville, MA.

Like most K-12 schools, Prospect Hill Academy Charter School is focused on improving student achievement and graduation rates, but struggled with the ability to access, report, and analyze student, teacher, and school data collected across multiple disparate sources. The school needed a system that would enable it to access and act on data related to (for example) student enrollment, graduation rates, attendance, discipline, and at-risk students. And they needed it to be easy to roll out and within their tight budget limits.

Engagement Objectives

• Existing silos of information - PowerSchool for SIS, Web data for State Reporting, Enrollment Data, Behavior and On-line usage all coming from disparate sources 
• Users require one centralized location to search ALL available data 
• Users need abilities to load student information—including grades, retention, and disciplinary issues—into a central repository to develop a comprehensive view for each student’s history 
• Provide segmented access to student information for the system’s users, so (for example) principals concerning their school while superintendent can access information districtwide
• Automate data extraction process
• Cost-effective

Solution 

• Built PowerSchool plug-ins to extract SIS data from PowerSchool portalv
• Assure built a PowerSchool Data Extraction application that automatically pulls data out of PowerSchool on scheduled intervals
• Implemented Qlik Analytical Platform - Superior data governance, data management and information delivery platform
• Built an associative Data Model with combined data from PowerSchool, Excel, DESE Data and Internal Systems
• Dashboards built for Student Demographics, Teachers Demographocs, Attendance, Behavior, DESE, Grades, Enrollment data
• Rich Visualizations built with Qlik, D3.js, and custom extensions. 

Results

• Improved User Experience with easy to use visualizations and automated data refresh and properly segmented access.
• Straightforward Relational / Associative model significantly reduces the complexity and costs associated with traditional relational database approach
• Holistic view of data on Qlik Analytical Platform, culled from multiple sources of data and with no additional investment for data-warehousing  

• Drastically reduced the time to extract data from Powerschool, SIS to on-premise
• In-memory processing for faster, scalable analysis
• Predictive analysis support
• High User adoption of the application - Projects delivered on-time within budget

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