How an 85,000-Student Maryland District is Integrating Edtech for Better Insights

In today’s schools, technology has become essential throughout classrooms, administrative operations, and in the home. Education technology is used daily to make all tasks more effective and efficient—from classroom software to manage a student’s learning to data collection and analytics programs to see student trends, struggles, and successes.  

According to the 2023 Education Focus Report: 

• 7 in 10 school and district-level leaders are optimistic about the changing roles of teachers, especially with regards to the increased use of technology and data 
• 83% of school educators agree when technology systems work together well, they get important time back in the day to get things done 

Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) understands how important technology is for making jobs more effective and efficient. Responsible for supporting 85,000 students across 130 schools, the district is in the midst of an ongoing journey to continually improve its ability to serve students, staff, and schools by using proven education technology.  

AACPS has focused on meeting current, new, and emerging needs by ensuring it maximizes current software systems and, when necessary, implements new solutions.

Partnering with AACPS on its edtech journey is PowerSchool, a leading provider of cloud-based K-12 software.  

“We make sure that we have an answer, approach, or solution to challenges and barriers that our teachers, schools, students, and families are dealing with,” says Jason Dykstra, the district’s Chief Accountability Officer, who oversees the Instructional Data Division. “Our journey has been this partnership with PowerSchool around customizations where we’ve found solutions to new problems with the existing platform. Approaching it as a journey is the right mentality for us. It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.”

Interoperability—when software systems communicate with each other to securely share data–reduces the strain on IT staff, frees teachers from the burden of juggling multiple accounts and transferring data from one program to another, and empowers educators with better and more complete insight into student performance.

Anne Arundel County Public Schools has partnered with PowerSchool to implement an interoperable set of core edtech products. Some of the most utilized include: 

• PowerSchool SIS for accurate, secure data at the heart of their entire digital ecosystem 
• PowerSchool Performance Matters—a flexible assessment platform with meaningful metrics to pinpoint where students need help 
• PowerSchool Student Analytics, providing a powerful data warehouse bringing together critical student data from multiple sources to offer insights 

Using these PowerSchool products together helps Anne Arundel County Public Schools easily see centralized data, including attendance, grades, scores, behavior, and discipline—to get a complete view of the whole child. By using comprehensive data, teachers and administrators can make informed decisions to help students succeed.  

“With PowerSchool, you can see everything you need to easily. It’s all right there,” Dykstra says. “You can get an accurate profile of each student. You click on what’s most important to you, and you can go in so many different directions. For the student to be successful, many things must be going well. They’ve got to be coming to school, on their best behavior, and getting the right support. They’ve got to have somebody monitoring them and seeing how they’re doing on tests over time, as an example. With PowerSchool, you get that instantaneously.” 

Before partnering with PowerSchool, many data points—including academic performance, extracurricular engagement, and even employment records—were manually managed through PDFs and physical paper copies, which created operational inefficiencies. Following PowerSchool’s integration into AACPS’ operations, the district has benefitted from PowerSchool’s solutions by aggregating student, teacher, and school district key performance indicators into a comprehensive, easy-to-use platform.

“As one of the largest school systems in Maryland, PowerSchool’s solutions have streamlined our ability to manage the high volume of student, teacher, and administrative information throughout our network,” says Anna Harding, Accountability Data Administrator, Anne Arundel County Public Schools. “PowerSchool has been a trusted district partner for years and continues to provide our employees with effective tools to help monitor, track, and assess student and teacher performance.” 

AACPS staff look forward to continuing to partner with PowerSchool to meet any challenge that lies ahead. The district is pleased with the PowerSchool partnership and the benefits integrated solutions provide.

“We have great solutions that support students, teachers, and our schools. We have information that’s readily available that we can analyze, monitor, and make decisions on,” says Dykstra.