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NEW SYSTEM HELPS SCHOOL DISTRICTS TRACK STUDENTS

A new web-based system to transfer student records electronically across schools and school districts is in place in 30 percent of the 1,031 school districts in Texas, organizers said Wednesday.

Currently, student records are paper transcripts that are mailed or hand carried between schools and districts and can take up to six months to arrive. The system can eliminate situations like the one encountered by a student who took geometry three times because his records did not arrive at each new school on time, said Roberto Gonzalez, chairman of the Educational Policy Committee of The Houston A+ Challenge.

The Web Enabled Student Transfer System, or WEST, was piloted in the Texas Education Agency Region IV Education Service Center’s 54 school districts, which include the Houston metropolitan area.

WEST, which also automates tracking of departed students, is an interface that sits on top of whatever student information management system a district uses. WEST then allows the districts and schools to pass transcripts back and forth.

“Great improvements can be achieved in public education when it receives adequate public support,” said Harry Reasoner, chairman of the board of Houston A+ Challenge. “WEST is an example of one of those improvements.”

Benefits of WEST:

• Eliminates wasted classroom time, teacher time and counselor time by providing schools with immediate access to student records to place new students in the right classes.
• Eliminates loss of financial aid by knowing, at registration time, the programs for which new students are qualified.
• Reduces paperwork and labor costs required for manual consolidation, assembly and mailing of records for students who leave the district or graduate.
• Reduces labor costs required for manual re-entry of student record data for students who transfer into a campus from a participating school district.
• Provides schools immediate access to critical information for a student’s Personal Graduation Plan.
• Eliminates redundant data and systems and reduce costs for participants.
• Provides critical information for economic workforce development.
• Provides accurate data on student achievement.
• Provides accurate data on high school completion.

“WEST does four things for us,” said Margaret Stroud, deputy superintendent of the Houston Independent School District . It enables the district to know immediately where students are when they change schools; it speeds up administrators’ ability to ensure the students get placed in the correct classes; it provides “real time” information and it will aid the district in the new student advocacy initiative launched recently, she said.

WEST was developed after a meeting of the Greater Houston Partnership Education and Workforce Development Committee in which the Houston A+ Challenge offered to raise funding to create a web-based record transfer system. At the meeting, superintendents from several Houston area districts told the committee one of the barriers to increasing the local high school graduation rate was the lag time in transferring records when students left one school and enrolled in another. In addition, students who did not re-enroll often could not be found with the system in place today.

“The Education Policy Committee of the Greater Houston Partnership sees this effort as a result of business and education searching for a practical answer to help with student mobility,” said John Cater, retired Chairman of Compass Bank and a member of the Greater Houston Partnership Education and Workforce Advisory Committee. “We applaud the efforts by school districts, organizations and business to come together to create an effort that crosses district lines on behalf of students.”

The Texas Business and Education Coalition and Triand, Inc., an Austin-based technology company, agreed to work to develop the system. The Region IV Education Service Center agreed to house the system on its servers and pilot WEST in its 54 school districts. Aldine ISD was one of the first districts to implement WEST, while Houston ISD agreed to provide training for other school districts. IBM donated equipment needed to support operation of WEST. Houston Endowment Inc. agreed to provide the majority of the funding for the one-year pilot.

“WEST will make it faster and easier to personalize our services to our students,” said Wanda Bamberg, assistant superintendent in the Aldine Independent School District. “It will help us be much more successful with advocacy and the personal graduation plan for each student.”

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