Delaware Schools Meet NCLB Requirements, Cut Costs by U.S ...



Overview

Country/Region: United States

Industry: Education

Customer Profile

The Delaware Department of Education, based in Dover, Delaware, serves 107,000 students through the state’s 19 school districts.

Business Situation

To help meet requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the DDOE wanted to replace its legacy UNIX student information solution with one based on Microsoft® Windows® technology.

Solution

The eSchoolPLUS solution from SunGard Pentamation is based on Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM, including Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000 and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Benefits

■ Meet NCLB requirements

■ Save $740,000 in lower TCO

■ Increase federal funding

■ Enable real-time reporting

| | |“Knowing where every student is on any particular day is crucial to meeting our accountability requirements. The SunGard Pentamation and Microsoft solution updates the state database every two hours.”

Bruce Dacey, Education Associate, Delaware Department of Education

| |

| | | | |

| | | |The Delaware Department of Education is replacing its legacy UNIX-based student information system |

| | | |with the Microsoft® .NET–connected eSchoolPLUS solution from SunGard Pentamation. The .NET Framework |

| | | |and Web services will enable the state to roll up and update student attendance information every two|

| | | |hours rather than on a weekly basis. The increased frequency is crucial to meeting federal regulatory|

| | | |requirements and boosting revenues from programs such as the free and reduced-cost lunch program. The|

| | | |DDOE also expects to reduce annual costs by $740,000. And the flexibility of the Framework-based |

| | | |solution makes it easy to expand to new devices – such as Pocket PCs and smartphones running |

| | | |Microsoft Windows MobileTM software – so teachers and administrators can use it in new and more |

| | | |productive ways. |

| | | | |

|[pic] | | |[pic] |

| | | | |

Situation

The Delaware Department of Education (DDOE), based in Dover, Delaware, serves the state’s 19 school districts and 107,000 students.

In 1999, the DDOE began offering a student information system (SIS) solution to its districts. That solution, the SunGard Pentamation Open Series, was a client-server solution hosted at DDOE headquarters that enabled districts to feed data to the statewide student identification system. All state and federal reporting on students – including statistics on English proficiency, free and reduced-cost lunch eligibility, and assessments on state standards – was based on this ID system.

Districts were encouraged but not required to participate in the SIS solution, and districts representing about 50 percent of the total student population chose to do so. The lack of full district participation compromised the solution’s value from the DDOE’s perspective. From the districts’ perspective, the UNIX-based solution – running SCO UNIX and Informix database software – was difficult and expensive to work with. Nor was the interface – as friendly or flexible as desired.

As the DDOE required more functionality from the solution – including components for teachers, parents, guidance counselors, and others – it had to add not just more software, but also more hardware, as each component of the solution needed to run on its own server. Even without full statewide participation, the DDOE saw its solution server farm grow to 40 servers. Maintaining those servers, and replacing approximately one-third of them each year, was a major and unwelcome investment for the DDOE.

This difficulty of this situation was exacerbated with the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. NCLB requires each state to assess the performance of all of its students, and the federal education dollars each state receives under the act are contingent upon compliance with the law’s reporting requirements and student progress. NCLB made it more important that all districts participate in the same SIS system, to rollup district data into a single statewide database.

NCLB also made it more important that the DDOE receive fully up-to-date and accurate information from each district. With the UNIX-based system, the statewide student ID system was updated every week – too infrequently to provide the accountability that DDOE needed.

When SunGard Pentamation invited DDOE to be an early tester of its new eSchoolPLUS software, the DDOE was interested, according to Dr. Bruce Dacey, Education Associate, DDOE. The new software is based on core Microsoft® technologies, including the Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software and the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1.

“We wanted to be able to collect all the data we needed from the districts in real time, for state and federal reporting and for the state testing system,” says Dacey. “We felt that Microsoft technology, particularly the .NET Framework and Web services, would make this possible.”

Solution

The DDOE is now in the process of migrating all of Delaware’s 19 school districts to the eSchoolPLUS solution, a process it expects to complete next year. eSchoolPLUS is a .NET-connected, Web-based student administration software solution that provides Delaware’s school districts with all of the applications they require to manage student data and meet reporting needs, including reporting on student registration, scheduling, attendance, grading, discipline, and medical records.

Teachers and administrators access the solution via their standard Web browser, which connects over the intranet to the eSchoolPLUS application. A Teacher Access Center allows teachers to take attendance, enter grades, and manage their gradebooks, including homework assignments.

Parents and their children, meanwhile, can access the students’ grades, and information on their attendance, discipline, homework and classroom assignments, even bus route information – all via a Home Access Center community portal. Teachers can send notes to parents through the solution.

Architecture and Deployment

The eSchoolPLUS solution is a three-tier, Web-based solution running on Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system. The database layer is served by Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000. The middle layer is served by the eSchoolPLUS application, with Microsoft pages served by Internet Information Services (IIS) in Windows Server. The user interface is provided through Internet Explorer 6.0 on user desktops.

The DDOE is phasing in this solution in three stages. An initial five-district pilot lasted 12 months. Then, the DDOE built a Web farm consisting of four Web servers running Windows Server 2003 with IIS and two database servers running SQL Server 2000. The two database servers comprise an active/passive cluster that enhances reliability.

One challenge for SunGard Pentamation was to provide a sophisticated, data-rich user interface in a thin-client environment. For example, the solution had to provide field-by-field, server-side validation on Web forms to provide the client-server-like functionality that users expected from the legacy application. To meet this need, all data calls between the client and server are passed in XML, which eliminates the need to do server-side form validation and provides users with instant feedback on their data input.

As it expands the solution to cover all districts in the state, the DDOE will scale out the infrastructure to include eight Web servers and four database servers.

"Overall, eSchoolPLUS is very easy to implement and to train our people on," says Dacey. "It provides more functionality than the old system and helps to speed the process of moving districts to the new solution."

Moving to the .NET Framework

SunGard Pentamation’s initial development of eSchoolPLUS predated the availability of the .NET Framework and the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET integrated development environment. That early development work was conducted using Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Basic® 6.0 development systems.

SunGard Pentamation then moved to Visual Studio .NET and the Visual Basic .NET development language for the rest of the solution. All future development will be done in the .NET Framework environment, according to Christopher Everleth, General Manager, SunGard Pentamation.

“Once we moved to Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework, we saw our development work accelerate by 50 percent,” says Everleth. “The .NET common language runtime, technology and stored procedures in SQL Server eliminated the need for at least 30 percent of the software we’d otherwise have had to write.”

Benefits

Meeting Regulatory Requirements

With the SunGard Pentamation and Microsoft solution, the DDOE is on track to fully meet state and federal requirements – including but not limited to NCLB – for tracking student assessment and attendance, according to Dacey.

“Knowing where every student is on any particular day is crucial to meeting our accountability requirements,” says Dacey. “We need to know where our kids are in real time. Our former solution updated the state database on a weekly basis. The SunGard Pentamation and Microsoft solution updates the state database every two hours.”

And Dacey expects the solution to do even better than that. As all 19 districts adopt the solution, the DDOE will pilot the use of the School Interoperability Framework (SIF), an industry standard that both Microsoft and SunGard Pentamation support. That will enable DDOE to use Web services to update the state database from the eSchoolPLUS solution in real time.

Meeting regulatory requirements isn’t an esoteric benefit. In addition to earning funds tied to assessments and reporting under NCLB, the solution will give the state more accurate, comprehensive and up-to-date student records that can be used to boost revenues in other ways.

For example, the DDOE expects to have a better picture of students qualified under the federal free and low-cost student lunch program and, thus, to increase the revenues it receives from that program.

“Revenues will absolutely go up as a result of this solution,” says Dacey.

Saving $740,000 in Reduced Costs

Dacey also expects the DDOE to reduce annual costs by about U.S.$740,000 as a result of the new solution.

A key savings will come from server consolidation. Before beginning the move to the new solution, the DDOE ran 40 UNIX servers to support the legacy application. When fully deployed, the new solution will require only 12 servers. Since the DDOE replaces approximately one-third of its servers each year, the new solution will enable it to avoid the replacement of approximately 10 servers each year. At an average cost of $10,000 each, that’s $100,000 in savings.

In addition, the DDOE anticipates major productivity savings from the new solution. Because it’s based on Microsoft technology with which the DDOE technology staff is already familiar, the DDOE can avoid the added expense of UNIX maintenance. In addition, the DDOE anticipates that the simpler, easy-to-use interface will reduce support and help desk needs by 50 percent. These support costs have totaled $640,000. Together with the hardware savings, the reduction in total cost of ownership is $740,000 per year – which the DDOE can redeploy to more strategic and value-added functions.

Enabling Growth

Beyond meeting regulatory requirements, increasing revenues, and decreasing costs, the solution will easily grow to support the DDOE and its school districts in entirely new ways, thanks to the .NET Framework.

For example, SunGard Pentamation’s Everleth anticipates extending the solution to include Pocket PCs and smartphones running Microsoft Windows MobileTM software. Thanks to the .NET Framework, Everleth and his colleagues can leverage their existing code as they expand the solution, rather than having to recode to accommodate the new devices.

And for the DDOE and its school districts, the addition of mobility will enable teachers to take attendance and make notes as they walk through their classrooms. Coaches can call up student information while they’re out in the field. And administrators can obtain information on students they encounter in the halls during class time.

“Now, we have a solution that’s really going to work for us and for the kids throughout the state for years to come,” says Dacey.

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows® component for building and running the next generation of applications and Web services.

framework

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is the rapid application development (RAD) tool for building next-generation Web applications and Web services. Visual Studio .NET empowers developers to rapidly design broad-reach Web applications for any device and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio .NET is fully integrated with the Microsoft .NET Framework, providing support for multiple programming languages and automatically handling many common programming tasks, freeing developers to rapidly create Web applications using their language of choice.

msdn.vstudio

Acquire Visual Studio .NET:

shop.devtools/default.asp

MSDN® Subscriptions:

msdn.subscriptions/prodinfo/overview.asp

-----------------------

“Once we moved to Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework, we saw our development work accelerate by 50 percent.”

Christopher Everleth, General Manager, SunGard Pentamation

| |

“Now, we have a solution that’s really going to work for us and for the kids throughout the state for years to come.”

Bruce Dacey, Education Associate, Delaware Department of Education

| |

“Our former solution updated the state database on a weekly basis. The SunGard Pentamation and Microsoft solution updates the state database every two hours.”

Bruce Dacey, Education Associate, Delaware Department of Education

| |

| |Software and Services

■ Products

Microsoft Windows Server System

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition

Microsoft Visual Basic .NET

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003

■ Technologies |Microsoft .NET Framework

Hardware

■ Dell PowerEdge 6650 servers

■ Dell PowerEdge 2650 servers

Partner

■ SunGard Pentamation | |

© 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, MSDN, Visual Basic, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Document published June 2004 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about SunGard Pentamation products and services, call (302) 739 - 4583 or visit the Web site at:

For more information about Delaware Department of Education, call (302) 739 - 4583 or visit the Web site at: doe.state.de.us

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download