Case Study

The Alvarado Independent School District (ISD) is a growing K-12 school district in northern Texas with a diverse population of 3,359 students. Located in Alvarado, Texas, in close proximity to the Dallas metro area, the Alvarado ISD consists of one high school, one junior high school, three elementary schools and an alternative campus school.

The challenge: finding a solution for updating and managing student information more efficiently and cost effectively

Until recently, the Alvarado ISD was using a combination of manual processes and limited automation to update and manage student information across the district's various systems. After extensive study and analysis, the Alvarado ISD administration, along with staff from the district's technology department, decided to find a more efficient and cost-effective solution for performing these tasks.

According to Kyle Berger, Executive Director of Technology Services for the Alvarado ISD, the transformation from manual to automated processes at the district occurred in several phases. "In the first phase, we established a zone integration server (ZIS) by Edustructures into the district's current Novell environment. The ZIS acted as the means of connection with the various systems already in place in the district," Berger says.

The second phase involved implementing Novell's Storage Manager to streamline the district's home directories. This made it possible to move directories and files automatically—without any staff intervention—when students went from school to school during their time in the district.

The third phase called for finding a student management system that could tie all of the other independently operating systems together with a single source of authority. These independent systems were inefficient and relatively expensive to maintain because of manual and automated processes that were often redundant and error prone.

Berger says a related and critical objective for the Alvarado ISD was finding a student management system that was aligned with the Student Interoperability Framework (SIF), the data-sharing open specification for K-12 academic institutions. By having a SIF-compliant student management system, the district would be able to better eliminate redundant data entry, increase efficiency and enhance software compatibility among its systems.

"A student management system by itself is just another database out on your network to manage," Berger says. "But a student management system with SIF interoperability is the powerhouse that can run your whole network for you."