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Jefferson County Public Schools
Scott D. Bell
Executive Director of Infrastructure Services
Diane Myskiw
Executive Director, Information Technology and Service Management
Golden, Colorado
86,700 Students

Jefferson County Improves Communications and Reduces Expenses
Jefferson County Colorado (JeffCo) was part of a 12-school consortium working together searching for a student information system. Decision criteria established by the consortium in addition to improved student administrative functionality was to invest in a system that let employees access the system from home and provided improved communications to district stakeholders including parents and guardians. JeffCo and the consortium selected Infinite Campus.

Life at JeffCo before Infinite Campus
The student information system (SIS) used at JeffCo prior to the Infinite Campus implementation, required the district’s infrastructure services team to manage individual transactions coming in from all 158 buildings across the district in order to update a central server overnight. The older system also required an individual user to pull down 20-30MB of files across the network to conduct a simple transaction. Due to this, JeffCo wasn’t able to provide access to all users since the network couldn’t support the heavy load required by the previous system.

“The previous system wasn’t meeting our needs and we weren’t able to provide access to our users in the classroom due to the network bandwidth requirements of the older client/server system,” said Scott D. Bell, executive director of infrastructure services for Jefferson County Schools.  “Management of the previous system was time consuming and my team spent a lot of time ensuring data movement across the network went smoothly so the data wasn’t corrupt.”

Only a handful of the JeffCo schools provided a web-based portal at the time. The portal tools were typically purchased individually by each school. The schools providing portal access for parents also were limited since only day old student information could be viewed since the server was refreshed overnight, rather than presenting information in real time.

Another limitation of the previous SIS was its ability to make available district-wide access to the system to enter and manage student data. This limited the amount and types of data provided to parents and guardians for viewing on the portal as well.

With Infinite Campus, the infrastructure services team was able to change its support model due to the system’s web-based design. JeffCo gives every building in the district, at no additional charge, a web-based portal for parents and students, an email communication tool leveraging their student data, and secure access for teachers and staff to their data from outside of the classroom in addition to a proven student administrative system.

“The Infinite Campus system is a lot less complicated to manage due to its integration and web-based design,” continued Bell. “It made it much easier for my team to give each school in our district a portal at no additional charge and administrating it is a simple district-level procedure”

Campus Portal
The Campus Portal gives parents and guardians secure access to data managed within the Infinite Campus system. The data being presented online comes directly from district and school-level staff and teachers in real time. Some of the information that can be posted on the Campus Portal includes school and district notices, assignments, grades, and report cards. For a complete listing of the possible information that can be made available through the Campus Portal, see sidebar.

JeffCo decided approximately three months after going live on the Infinite Campus system to launch a pilot program for the Campus Portal. Six schools were identified to be included in the pilot. A few months after the success of the pilot, the district gave all buildings the opportunity to “turn on” the Campus Portal.

“We waited until fall to start a pilot program for the Campus Portal and had six schools volunteer,” said Bell. “The pilot program gave us an opportunity to try out the functionality and ensure we were comfortable with its capabilities before offering the Campus Portal to the rest of the district.”

One of the main benefits provided by the Campus Portal is its ability to leverage the information already being managed within the system and presenting it through a secure logon to parents and guardians in real time. For example, when a classroom teacher enters attendance at the start of the period, the attendance information is instantly available to parents and guardians. So if the parent or guardian is interested in knowing whether their high school student made it to class, all they need to do is logon to the Campus Portal, using their secure username and password, and view the information desired.

“When teachers enter attendance, grades, and assignments through the Campus Gradebook, this information is leveraged and presented in real time on the Campus Portal,” said Diane Myskiw, executive director information technology service management of Jefferson County Schools. “This gives our teachers another way to communicate with parents without expecting them to re-enter data twice.”

JeffCo parents depend on the Campus Portal daily. With over 8,000 unique logons each day, the Campus Portal is encouraging active participation by parents in each student’s progress and simplifies communications.

“When we first began tracking portal usage, we noticed interesting peaks in the late afternoon between 3 and 4 p.m.” said Bell. “It occurred to us that parents and guardians were logging into the system to see how their student’s day went – did they attend class, were there any new assignments posted, and were there any new notices posted?”

The Campus Portal has given JeffCo the ability to communicate with parents without requiring additional data entry or the tapping of additional IT resources to post data. The Campus Portal gives parents and guardians a tool to help them talk with their students about their day and stay informed throughout the year, not just during parent/teacher conference times.

“Parents think the Campus Portal is fantastic” continued Myskiw. “One of our goals as an administrative team going forward is to help identify new ways of providing Internet access to parents of students that do not have computers through our public libraries and local employers so more parents can be more involved with their student’s daily progress.”

Campus Messenger
For JeffCo, the Campus Messenger has become a cost effective tool to communicate with external audiences. Campus Messenger with email is included with the Infinite Campus system and is used to deliver communications leveraging the data managed in it. JeffCo also invested in Campus Messenger with voice giving them the ability to send non-urgent voice messages to parents and guardians.

Campus Messenger has been set up to send email and/or voice messages when a student is absent or tardy. Parents and guardians identify their preferred method of receiving messages and the office staff can indicate that preference within Infinite Campus. This ability has saved JeffCo labor expenses associated with managing communications since previously messages were prepared and distributed manually prior to the Infinite Campus implementation.

“For JeffCo schools, Campus Messenger is more important to them than the Campus Portal,” said Bell. “For example, if a student is absent and the parent requests it, the Infinite Campus system has been set up to automatically sends a message to the parent who frees our staff from manually writing and distributing emails – saving us time and money.”

Campus Messenger is also reducing the cost of ownership by letting the district distribute communications via email instead of through traditional mail. For example, in September 2006, JeffCo sent out 133,238 emails to parents and guardians averaging over 5,100 emails per day. During the month of September, JeffCo estimates Campus Messenger saved the district $57,000 over traditional paper-based mailing.

“The ability to distribute email messages versus traditional mail has already made a positive financial impact on our district in out-of-pocket expenses,” said Bell. “The time spent by our office staff to organize, print, stuff, and post traditional letters is now spent helping our students and staff in other more effective ways.”

Campus Messenger at JeffCo
September 2006
133,238 emails

Labor Cost Savings
Estimate 30 seconds to print, fold and stuff envelope
Assume average employee cost with benefits $25 per hour
Campus Messenger saved district 735 person hours or 92 person work days or
$ 18,373.33

Printing and Material Costs
$0.05 per piece plus $0.39 first class postage = $0.44 per letter
$ 38,804.48

Total savings for September $57,177.81

In addition, JeffCo is also using Campus Messenger with voice to distribute messages to parents and guardians who prefer voice messages to email and to communicate in multiple languages. The district also uses the tool to communicate with parents and guardians who may not have access to computers and the Internet so that the district is able to reach all stakeholders.

The Future
When JeffCo invested in Infinite Campus, they knew they would be able to improve communications with parents, guardians and students through the tools provided by Infinite Campus. In addition, what they appreciated even more is the ability to save the district and their taxpayer’s money by leveraging the Internet and email to deliver real-time communications.

“Two of the biggest selling points of the system for school-level buy in across our district were the communication tools – Campus Portal and Campus Messenger,” said Bell. “The ability to provide a direct communication link to parents and reduce paper-based mailing expenses was a huge cost savings for our district.”

The next step for the district will be to open up the Campus Messenger email tools for use by teachers. This will open a dialog from the classroom teacher with students and parents about a variety of topics, eliminating the need for backpack messages.

“Our teachers are going to enjoy the ability to use Campus Messenger to send emails to students,” summarized Myskiw. “It will let our teachers send a friendly reminder to parents about an upcoming field trip or to open a dialogue with students regarding a particular topic – the communication possibilities for our teachers are infinite.”