Hatboro Horsham School District

Horsham, Pennsylvania

Being more informed almost always leads to being safer...and smarter...and efficient.

Whenthe Hatboro-Horsham School District went through the entire Level Data information vetting process, it not only provided several light-bulb moments that in one scenario better connected the school nurses’ information with the teaching staff -- but then implementing Level Data’s service in April, 2010 led to a utilization of several more underused district-wide educational software packages.

After little more than one year in operation, Level Data’s Managed Service has simply made life easier for, and more interconnected across, the 5,200-student district.

One of the most noticeable areas of improvement was monitoring student health. The school nurses were using Safire® software and were content, but by examining the use of the software with Level Data’s outside eyes, learned they could do much more. Marc Greenberg, the district’s director of software application and data management, said using Level Data helped design a greatly-improved emergency card with photos, and moving accurate data they already had so parents don’t have to re-write common information each year.

“The nurses can also flag emergency alerts in Safire that Level Data brings back into PowerSchool® so the teachers see it; everyone has more data at their fingertips,” Greenberg said. “There were holes in the system that this has brought out that no one ever talked about, and that’s a good thing for us.”

Mark Heringslake, the coordinator of information technology, agreed. “The end users were living with conditions or situations that, while they were functional and they could survive with, it wasn’t the best opportunity,” he said. “The entire district was impacted by the way we did this process. The nurses are happy, secretaries are happy, teachers will be happy, parents will be happy. It’s a bonus all the way up and down and everybody wins – and the data is up-to-date, it’s refreshed.”

Heringslake said the transformation has gone way beyond just transmitting data in an automated fashion, “it was more of the whole process review and improvements scenario that turned a ‘we’re okay’ to a ‘now we’re cooking with gas’ type of situation that has really made everyone’s life way better.”

In recent years they had connectors created by another outside vendor to interweave SIF® with multiple programs, but it didn’t live up to the need and the data was not always accurate. Not only did Level Data’s review reveal what problems still existed, but “I also like that Level Data is a hosted service; we don’t have to use up a server, we don’t have to babysit it,” Greenberg said.

Greenberg elaberated: Performance Tracker® never really got off the ground for four years, but “now it’s running and the academic folks are jumping up and down. The nurses are ecstatic, and it seems every department we’re going into, bringing them on line, they’re loving it all.” He added that while the library staff liked running Destiny® with SIF, when it came time to renew the Destiny software, the librarians wanted the Level Data solution instead.

The end result?

“SIF is pretty much dead in our district,” Greenberg said. “Our director of technology has see nthe light – and he’s happy too because (by turning off SIF) he got a server back and gets to use it for something else – a new resource. It’s a win-win.”