Anne Arundel’s Edtech Journey: Partnering with PowerSchool to Meet Any Challenge

A focus on effective, efficient software has helped inform action, change, and decision-making

Challenges

Secure, accurate data management capabilities
Meaningful metrics to identify struggling students
Existing data warehouse was being sunsetted

Solutions

Results

Clean student data within the entire edtech ecosystem
Ability to see comprehensive whole-child data in a single view
Intuitive data analytics platform with real-time insights

Responsible for supporting 85,000 students across 130 schools, Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) understands how important technology is for making jobs more effective and efficient. As part of its ongoing education technology journey, the district has focused on identifying needs and either maximizing current software systems to meet those needs or implementing new solutions to overcome challenges.

“We use technology to find better ways to support students—more effectively and efficiently,” says Jason Dykstra, the district’s Chief Accountability Officer, who oversees the Instructional Data Division. “While we want to be effective, we also want to be efficient because we don’t want to just put five more hours of work on a teacher every week.”

PowerSchool, a leading provider of cloud-based K-12 software, has partnered with the district at each step of its edtech journey. No matter what challenge Anne Arundel faces, feels confident that they can tackle it in partnership with PowerSchool.

“We want to ensure we have an answer, approach, or solution to challenges and barriers that our teachers, schools, students, and families are dealing with,” he says. “Our journey of partnership with PowerSchool has included customizations in places 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.”

Anne Arundel’s edtech journey: It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.
Jason Dykstra Chief Accountability Officer
Anne Arundel Public Schools

The Need: A Secure Student Data Management System

AACPS prioritizes the use of student data to drive decision-making throughout the district. That’s why the district values PowerSchool SIS, part of the Student Information Cloud, in managing student data and helping to ensure clean, accurate information throughout its edtech ecosystem.

“Our focus with PowerSchool SIS is on data integrity. We make sure that what goes into the student information system is accurate because we put a high premium on data quality,” Dykstra says. “We use PowerSchool SIS as the source of truth throughout our system. When you feed data to hundreds of different systems like we do, we have to make sure that there is one source of that information from a common denominator standpoint. For us, that is PowerSchool SIS.”

Students, families, teachers, and schools have an expectation of data security and privacy, and PowerSchool SIS has quality control measures built into the system that give the district the ability to identify inconsistencies or errors with their data.

“In Maryland, there have been many news stories regarding teachers and schools changing grades. But with PowerSchool SIS, we’ve restricted access so only one person in each school has permission to change historical grades. That helps us ensure data integrity,” says Dykstra.

PowerSchool SIS has streamlined AACPS’ efforts to track students’ engagement in clubs, sports, and organizations. Staff also noted PowerSchool’s ability to aggregate all student and teacher information into a comprehensive interface has eliminated several pain points.

The Need: Assessment Platform to Help Students Perform Better

AACPS needed to support teachers to improve student outcomes, and they wanted a better way to find meaningful metrics and pinpoint where students needed help. The district was eager to use student data to make a difference, so it has added PowerSchool Performance Matters, part of the Personalized Learning Cloud.

Performance Matters enables educators to administer social and emotional learning surveys and assessments to identify learning gaps and track student needs.

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

With Performance Matters… I have the ability to impact a kid, as opposed to ‘I’ve already lost this kid.’
Anna Harding Accountability Data Administrator
Anne Arundel Public Schools

Harding says the early warning system (EWS) functionality of Performance Matters has helped the district flag at-risk behavior ahead of time. ”We’ve gone through an evolution,” she says. “When we first rolled Performance Matters out, early warning was a new idea. We had picked a few of the areas: attendance, behavior, and course failures. Now we have five flags and have added mobility and retention in to the original three.”

Once notified by the EWS, staff can drill down to what’s really going on in the classroom and use key insights to make data-driven learning decisions sooner.

“With Performance Matters, now there’s this idea of ‘I have the ability to impact a kid,’ as opposed to ‘I’ve already lost this kid,'” says Harding.

“Most of us are data rich and decision-making poor,” adds Dykstra. “We have plenty of data, but are we managing it and working with it well? We use Performance Matters almost exclusively for student-teacher level data. It helps with analysis, reporting, and providing data for discussions about which students need support, which can we celebrate their successes, and which are showing growth?”

The Need: A Data Warehouse with Real-Time Insights

When the district’s existing data warehouse was being sunsetted, AACPS needed a new platform that pulled together data from multiple systems in real time. The system also had to be able to archive data. AACPS chose PowerSchool Student Analytics, a K-12 analytics and data management tool offering a complete picture of schools, classrooms, and districts. is also part of the Student Information Cloud.

Student Analytics’ dashboards offer the district clear insights needed to connect the dots in seeing the whole child and making impactful, meaningful decisions.

“The effectiveness of Student Analytics and where we’ve gone in our edtech journey lies in the creation of dashboards,” says Dykstra. “They give us all kinds of information, and it’s available to any stakeholder. We can also have internal dashboards for our schools, administrators, teachers, and specific groups to do their work more efficiently.”

AACPS uses Student Analytics to look at aggregated data and see which schools need more support and which are showing the most growth. They can see how certain student groups are performing across an identified cluster, grade level, school, or across the entire district.

You can drill down into any data set in literally two clicks.
Jason Dykstra Chief Accountability Officer
Anne Arundel Public Schools

“The beauty of Student Analytics is that you can drill down into any data set in literally two clicks. There’s tremendous power in that,” says Dykstra. “Not everyone always has the knowledge to understand data insights, and Student Analytics gives it to us quickly and easily. We have the tools to look at departments, students, and schools in one or two clicks. It’s amazing to me how readily accessible the information is and the formats that you can get it in.”

The Need: A College and Career Readiness Platform to Prepare Students for Life

“When I was 13 or 14, if somebody asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I wouldn’t know,” says Dykstra.

But with PowerSchool Naviance CCLR, part of the Workforce Development Cloud, the district can help students answer that critical question and prepare for their futures with personalized college, career, and life-readiness planning tools.

“Naviance helps students understand that there’s a big, wonderful world out there, and they’re going to have a lot of opportunities, but they need to think about and plan for them,” Dykstra says. “With Naviance CCLR, tools are available to students to help them understand their strengths, interests, and skills. Before, we didn’t have that. We helped with college applications and navigating schools they’re interested in, but this world’s beyond that. Naviance gets them to reflect more.”

Dykstra says that as part of the edtech journey, the district continues to explore the Naviance product to get the most out of it. He says their goal is to infuse it more strategically into the lives of students and their families to help prepare them for college and careers.

The Need: Leveraging Integration between PowerSchool Products

Using PowerSchool products together helps AACPS see integrated data, including attendance, grades, scores, behavior, and discipline — to see 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 AACPS partnered 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 integrated solutions by aggregating student, teacher, and school district key performance indicators into a comprehensive, easy-to-use platform.

“We have a lot of PowerSchool products,” says Dykstra. “It’s been a good partnership, and 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.”

Learn more about Anne Arundel County Public Schools’ Story

Read the blog or watch the video to find out more about how the entire district is using data and benefits from PowerSchool solutions.

Learn More about the PowerSchool Student Information Cloud

Find out how to bring your operations into the future with the first complete cloud-hosted solution for student information, enrollment, data management, and analytics. Explore Here