Lake Wales Charter Schools Multi-System Enrolment Automated Synchronization
BAS Technologies provide custom automated multi system enrolment and synchronization for schools. This is the story of how we helped the team at Lake Wales win back some of their time and reducing the burden of enrolments across multiple systems.
The customer
Lake Wales Charter Schools Inc. is a non-profit charter system that consists of four conversion elementary schools, two traditional start-up middle schools, and one conversion high school. With a mission to bring the best of public education to the community by providing innovation and choice within a continuous pre-school through postsecondary curriculum so that each child recognizes the benefits of life-long learning, constructive citizenship and personal happiness. Created to be high-quality education to the Lake Wales community, the System was established in 2003. The System’s student enrolment is approximately 5,000, generating consolidated revenues of $57 million.
The challenge
The need and benefits of converting to charter school status also includes challenges in integrating with the legacy of the public school system. In particular, the charter has decided to retain the
support of public county school district for their Student Information System (Focus) as a practical solution for their main school operational management. Integrating this with the ever-increasing range of other systems used to support learning and other operational tasks was a huge overhead. A new student enrolling in the school is onboarded in Focus and the process was then to manually export reports and manually extract relevant data to upload. This data was then modified and enriched before uploading to over 20 other disparate systems – none of which had the same input format. The whole process sometimes took weeks to get a student fully enrolled in all the systems to enable them to start their learning journey and absorbed several hours of the support team’s time.
Lake Wales Charter Schools had looked into a variety of options and other vendors had told them that automation was not possible – this is where BAS Technologies came in with a cost-effective proposal that not only ended the pain of manual processing but opened opportunity to enhance the school’s efficiencies through data centralization and custom applications.
The solution
Using a combination of our automated processes and integrating some systems by feeding into Clever, BAS Technologies successfully created a solution that performs two-way synchronization of the systems at Lake Wales. It was chosen to run this as batch processing because that was most suitable for the systems being used however some data is synchronized in real time using API integration.
The custom solution also has the benefit of creating a central PostgreSQL database that creates historical data views as well as real time information, allowing data analysis and reporting. BAS Technologies developed custom .NET Core Blazor web applications to present and enrich this data. The system is securely hosted on Google Cloud Linux virtual machines and is compliant with data regulations appropriate to the student information stored which includes FERPA, COPPA and HIPAA. Our use of rapid application development technologies and agile project management enabled cost effective solutions within a very tight budget.
The result
Since our solution implementation, the staff at Lake Wales Charter School can focus more on enhancing student outcomes with a fraction of the system management overhead. The schools also have access to centralized information to support their strategic planning and every-day operations. Using this core data source, the Lake Wales team have added applications and functionality for activities that were not previously viable such as student progress early warnings, discipline trends and mental health support. The solutions have added much more value to their processes, and less time spent in inefficient spreadsheets.
Our mission for schools
Our mission is to add value in the process of managing student information in schools, making it easier and less of a burden so that our schools can focus on enriching our students’ learning journey to make for a better future.
Teachers teach because they have something to offer that will make a difference to their students’ lives and we want to support them in whatever way we can.
Contact us to learn how your school could work smarter like Lake Wales.