Customer Solution Case Study
/ School District Builds Closer Connections with Schools, Students, Community Online
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Education—Primary and secondary schools
Customer Profile
The Rochester City School District provides quality education to more than 34,000 children and 11,000 adults in Rochester, New York.
Business Situation
Ways to share information in the district and with students, parents, and the community were inefficient and inconsistent. The district needed a central location for shared information and better communication.
Solution
The district partnered with NuSoft Solutions to implement a unified content management strategy based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
Benefits
n Accelerated information flows between District and schools by 3-5 days
n Increased use of online resources by teachers
n Enhanced administrator collaboration and accelerated policy-making process by 80 percent
n Simplified user interface increases technology use by teachers / “Prior to the implementation of SharePoint [Server], dissemination of information could take days, even weeks, to flow from our district offices to the schools.”
Ford Greene, Information Systems & Technology Division Chief, Rochester City School District
To serve a large and greatly diverse student population, the Rochester City School District (RCSD) has been progressively placing computers with Internet access in many students’ homes through business and community programs. To build on that success, RCSD wanted to improve how it collaborated and managed documents internally, while enabling its schools to deliver information, assignments, and resources to students, families, and the community online. Partnering with NuSoft Solutions, RCSD chose a solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® 2007 that enables administrators to efficiently share and publish information, while design tools make it easy for schools to create and manage Web content. The solution enables the school district to become more effective internally while providing students with a world-class educational resource.
Situation
The Rochester City School District (RCSD) operates 39 elementary schools, 16 secondary schools, one adult/family learning center, and several alternative education programs. Large in population and ethnically diverse, the district faces a number of challenges, including pervasive poverty, highstudent mobility, and large numbers of students from single-parent and non-English-speaking families. In fact, children represent 28 foreign countries and speak 35 different languages. The district also must meet increased requirements for accountability despite limited resources.
Despite these challenges, RCSD has achieved many successes in student performance and has many programs in place that are making a difference in student achievement. Significant among these is a program to both enhance the school’s ability to connect with its constituents and improve learning outcomes by providing Internet access to parents and students in their homes.
Operating Priorities
In 2002, the Rochester Board of Education approved three major priorities for the district:
n Demonstrate growth in student achievement in all schools
n Advance new technologies and processes to improve financial management, reporting, budgeting, and forecasting; and advance overall system improvements
n Improve customer and partner satisfaction, service, and responsiveness while promoting morale, communication, and accountability
To move forward in addressing these priorities, the district implemented the following business strategies:
Improve Effectiveness of Internal Information Processes
The district recognized that existing processes for communicating internally were inefficient and inconsistent. Information critical to such issues as teacher assignments, student placement, transportation, and catering needed to reach diverse groups of users for the effective running of schools. Such information was often difficult to locate or could exist in multiple, inconsistent forms.
“Dissemination of information could take days, even weeks, to flow from our district offices to the schools,” states RCSD Information Systems & Technology Division Chief Ford Greene. “Formal documents would be prepared, copied, sent to the mailroom, distributed to the schools, and finally make their way to the teachers’ mail slots.” This situation increased the time spent by school administrators searching for information and slowed down decision making.
Improve Schools’ Ability to Publish Information to Internet
Similar issues existed in communicating outward—from schools to students, parents, and partners in the community—including information such as event calendars, announcements, assignments, and learning resources. While programs were in place to provide some students and families with Web access in the home, only limited use was being made to utilize this as an opportunity for closer communication and integration with the school.
A number of schools and teachers had set up Web sites. However, the majority of schools lacked the technical ability, knowledge, and resources to do the same—and few processes or guidelines existed for managing quality and consistency.
Critical Success Factors for Communications Processes
C. Michael Robinson, Deputy Superintendent and Chief of Operations for Rochester City School District, is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the district. He identified several critical success factors (and associated key performance indicators, or KPIs) for communications processes:
n Ease of finding and sharing information between school administrators (the number of people involved in distributing an internal report; the time required for an internal report to reach all recipients)
n Usage level of electronic teaching resources by teachers (the hours per day spent using electronic teaching resources)
n Effectiveness of district-level decision-making processes (the time required for principals to produce a policy document)
n Web resource utilization by schools (the number of schools utilizing the Web to share resources; the cost to the school; the consistency and quality of content)
Solution
The Rochester City School District, with its implementation partner NuSoft Solutions, participated in the Rapid Deployment Program for the 2007 Microsoft® Office system. In the course of the program, the district deployed a portal solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
Help Administrators Find and Share Information
Out-of-the box functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007 provided the district with an online, enterprisewide portal that can be used to store, organize, publish, and share important information. A major function of this portal is to provide teachers and administrators with access to the district’s new student management system, applications, and resource libraries.
“SharePoint [Server] provided a common front end to all of the district’s major applications,” says RCSD Student Information Services Manager, Erwin Smith. “By utilizing the Single Sign-On feature, we have seamlessly integrated our Student Management, Special Education, Finance, and Human Resource applications. Information sharing between the district office, building administrators, and teachers occurs instantaneously. Applications and information are literally one mouse click away.”
The district uses document libraries to organize and publish documents such as student learning plans, staffing reports, and other important information that otherwise would have been shared by e-mail or other means. With powerful search functionalities in Office SharePoint Server 2007, users are able to easily find the right information quickly, and when changes are made, the updates are immediately available.
The solution also allows district administrators, schools, and teachers to publish content in a single location within the district-level site and have that content appear on school-level sites in a consistent manner. Using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, information on the portal such as lunch menus, bus routes, district announcements, documents, and forms can be published easily to school sites, and parents and students can request to be notified automatically when certain content has been updated.
Enable Schools to Use the Web for Content Sharing
New layout and graphics tools in Office SharePoint Server 2007 enable RCSD staff to produce better-looking Web sites without the need for any additional Web authoring software. A set of Web templates enables the district to maintain a certain level of control over navigation and content, yet allows schools to present a unique look and functionality and have ownership over their content. Navigation controls across all sites are consistent, providing continuity and simplicity for site visitors. These tools enable the district to create consistent Web sites across all schools, as well as minimize the time and effort to create and update Web sites.
School-level users also have the ability to publish content on school sites using RSS. This gives parents the option of subscribing to particular content channels and having those channels delivered directly to their email inboxes or RSS readers.
Maintain the Quality and Consistency of Web Content
Web content management tools within Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide a simple method of authoring and publishing content quickly and easily. Master pages and layouts allow district administrators to create Web templates to be used across all schools.
RCSD also utilized the workflow capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to automate the review and approval of selected types of content before it is published. User permissions can be set at virtually any level of detail so that a user might be able to edit only one page or a whole Web site, while one or several others may be responsible for reviewing and approving the content before it is visible to others.
Benefits
Through the implementation of the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system, the Rochester City School District has already begun to achieve several important benefits.
Accelerated District’s Internal Communications Processes
A Handbook for Principals, an important internal communication, used to be handled by as many as six different people and take up to five days to finalize on its way from the district to a school administrator, but can now be sent instantly and directly to recipients. Simply by publishing internal documents using SharePoint Server 2007, RCSD has eliminated the unnecessary handling and delays from the process, meaning administrators have faster access to the information needed to run schools.
Increased Teacher Access to Online Teaching Resources
By taking all of the resources teachers need—such as lesson plans, class registers, and teaching resources—and making them searchable and accessible remotely from District and School SharePoint sites, RCSD estimates teachers spend approximately two hours more per day using electronic teaching resources. Whereas historically lesson planning was primarily focused around the school, the new solution enables teachers to work effectively outside the school.
Increased Principals’ Collaboration and Speed to Decision-Making
The demands of running busy schools previously made it challenging for RCSD’s sixty principals to work together at a district level to define policy. On-site meetings were difficult to schedule, and creating documents typically involved distributing files by e-mail and going through multiple rounds of feedback and revision, lasting an average of 2.5 weeks.
By utilizing the powerful and user-friendly document collaboration features in the district’s SharePoint-enabled document libraries, principals are able to collectively work on policy documents in a shared workspace in real-time, or on their own time. This has accelerated the process for developing policy statements by 80 percent from an average of 2.5 weeks down to just 2.5 days.
Provided Easy-to-Learn, Easy-to-Use Access to Resources
The intuitive interface and ease of access presents a less intimidating challenge to teachers, many of whom had little previous computing experience. As a hub for sharing information across the district, and also for accessing other resources including state curriculum and classroom resources, the Office SharePoint Server 2007–based solution enabled large numbers of teachers to expand the breadth of resources they draw upon in their teaching. “You can see the true power of SharePoint [Server] lies in the fact that we trained 3,500 teachers in 2 days to effectively utilize the online system for managing student information,” states RCSD Student Information Services Manager, Erwin Smith, “and there is no way we could have done that without SharePoint.”
A Platform for Communicating with Parents and Community
Office SharePoint Server provides a centralized platform for creating and managing external communications. This allows RCSD to consolidate multiple school Web sites resident with multiple Internet Service Providers into a common, district-wide standard host. This also provides the opportunity for the Chief of Communications to exercise editorial oversight, while also being able to provide information that is relevant to all employees and students.
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office
About Business Value Assessment
This business value research study was developed by Capgemini using the Microsoft Rapid Economic Justification Framework to assess the business value of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
For information on how to repeat this study for your organization, contact your local Microsoft representative or go to:
www.microsoft.com/value
Partner Profile
NuSoft Solutions is one of the nation’s leading implementers of business and educational solutions that transform organizations and make technology a catalyst in maximizing efficiency and effectiveness. With its deep knowledge and experience in the latest Microsoft systems and solutions, NuSoft helps its clients design and implement truly revolutionary solutions that keep them ahead of their competition.
In addition to transforming Fortune 1,000 companies, NuSoft specializes in educational solutions that revolutionize the way information is accessed and shared in K–12 and post-secondary environments. NuSoft provides powerful Web-based portals, integration services, and reporting solutions that increase student achievement, maximize schools’ responsiveness, improve the decision-making process, and enhance the collaboration experience between students, parents, faculty, and staff. By providing intuitive, anytime/anywhere access to information, NuSoft enables its customers to elevate the quality of education they provide to their students.
NuSoft was recognized as one of the top six custom application development companies in the world at Microsoft’s 2006 Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. It previously received the Microsoft 2004 Partner of the Year Award for Innovation in Education.