One Record to Inform Them All

“What percentage of your student body is people of color?” Whether it’s an inquiring family, incoming administrator or current community member that’s asking, you don’t want your answer to be, “Well, it depends on which database we ask.”

Eric Heilman, executive director of the Center for Institutional Research in Independent Schools (CIRIS), senior strategist at Mission & Data, and also director of institutional research at Maret School in Washington, DC, lived out this example at his school in recent years. At the 650-student K-12 day school, a task force that included directors of admissions, communications, DEI, advancement, technology and institutional research spent months looking at racial categories in school data systems and coming up with a consistent standard. “Part of the problem was that every year or two, somebody would want to change the language of one of our racial categories. But then you have the question: How do we connect this to our previous data? Should we just recode everybody to the new category? Sometimes that’s not possible.”

The goal was to adopt a system that would be stable over time. “We knew at the beginning there would be no system that everybody would agree on, no matter what we do.” After working the art of compromise, school leaders are now able to not only answer immediate questions about the student body but also consider longitudinal trends in reliable data when considering high-level priorities and plans.

Now imagine that during a student emergency, a query for parental contact information returns both current and outdated phone numbers, and you have to sort through them in real time. Or that your school experiences a cyber breach, and you’re not completely clear on what systems across campus house personally identifiable information or how those system are or aren’t connected. If you’re motivated by “carrots” more than “sticks,” imagine strategic decision-making based on data rather than anecdote, with increased understandings of the impact across departments and teams.

From security to strategy, the reasons to streamline school data operations are many — and there are resources to help schools to do it. More than money, these efforts require what is arguably school leaders’ most limited commodity: time, with open communication and open minds at the heart of successful efforts.

The Big Bang

“Too many systems. Too many Excel spreadsheets. It’s just too many, and it’s not a sane way to do business,” said Nathan Gault, chief information officer at Stevenson School, a 750-student boarding and day school in Pebble Beach, California. In the 1990s “everybody went through what I call the Big Bang,” he continued, “where all of a sudden you could buy any number of products to manage all of these different business processes.” What resulted was an abundance of siloed systems.

At Buckingham Browne & Nichols School (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this played out in the physical shipping of student records from the middle to the high school campus, among other examples. “We had systems that were very, very old, and they functioned fine, but they didn’t do anything other than functioning,” said Tara Gohlmann, CFO/COO at the preschool-grade 12 day school enrolling 1,000 students. “I said: It doesn’t have to be that way.”

For BBN, that meant switching to Veracross — during the pandemic, which was far from ideal, reported Gohlmann — to centralize and modernize records. From the time of inquiry, a student’s record will follow them through matriculation, graduation and into their alumni years. Whereas she previously had to call several people to collect relevant information on a student when an important decision had to be made, she now has to call only one or two. Eventually the goal is to simply access what she needs herself, with the proper administrative permissions. All the areas of information needed, e.g., academic, counseling, extracurricular, transportation, financial, are now all in one place.

But while the new system is a significant improvement, it’s not without its own pain points. BBN is in the process of hiring a database administrator to clean up the records and help ensure that all users of the school information system across campus are using it consistently going forward. One student might have multiple records created by different departments, which need to be merged, for example. “Every year we keep the system without cleaning up the data, the problem will balloon,” Gohlmann explained.

And every system will have limitations. “A single company being able to produce all the tools that you need for everything is just not feasible, from their side,” said Hudson Harper, assistant head of school at The Downtown School, a grades 9-12 day school with 160-students in Seattle. “They simply can’t nail every single aspect of what your school needs.” Downtown is a micro-school, whose business needs are processed by Lakeside School, which launched Downtown in 2018, and together they use Blackbaud. “Vendors are not necessarily setting us up for success in terms of being able to relate our data,” he said. It’s not in their best interest, he pointed out, though initiatives like Project Unicorn are advocating for increased interoperability among edtech applications.

To collate the data that school leaders need, Harper has used the APIs of different systems to build what he calls a “data lake house,” from which he built dashboards that connect different sources. He has led workshops with ATLIS and CIRIS to help other school leaders do the same. As for Stevenson and Gault’s solution to the “Big Bang,” they’ve completely reinvented data operations at the school — more below.

A Team Sport

Managing the availability, usability, integrity and security of school data is called data governance. When presenting on the topic at the 2024 NBOA Annual Meeting, Ally Wenzel, director of technology at Stevenson also underscored how data governance ensures school compliance with legal and ethical data standards and ultimately enhances decision-making and operational efficiency. (See sidebar above for definition of key data governance terms.)

It’s a “a team sport,” she explained. Wenzel, as does CIRIS, recommends forming a data governance or data strategy team, which should include primary users of institutional data in academic, operational and technical areas. This may mean academic leaders and directors of enrollment, advancement, technology, communications and the business office. The group can prepare both the school’s data defense — minimizing security issues and ensuring data integrity — and data offense — supporting business objectives through data analysis, systems integration and dashboards.

Wenzel outlined a basic cycle of actions for the team: First, identify goals for the group and a cadence for meetings. Then work on a data policy and style guide, and eventually strategy. Evaluate progress, communicate progress and return to the goals to see if they should remain the same or evolve.

Just last fall, CIRIS published “Data-Informed Decision-Making: A Guide to Institutional Research at Independent Schools,” which includes full chapters on data governance and strategy as well as data culture. In addition to the steps outlined above, the CIRIS guide specifies that a data governance or strategy team will need to designate stewards of school data, discuss and arbitrate data access privileges, assess regulatory compliance, ensure any projects or initiatives identified by the group align with the school’s strategic priorities, and foster a healthy data culture, meaning leaders are open to learning from any data analysis that is presented. (See sidebar above for the four pillars of data culture).

Ultimately the team should formulate a school-wide data strategy, laid out in the following steps, which are further explained in the guide:

1. Identify key data domains (e.g., SIS, financial data, HR data).
2. Set data governance goals (e.g., improving data quality and security, increase accessibility and informed decision-making).
3. Assess the state of your current data infrastructure and governance (i.e., create a data inventory and map of where data lives and how it flows).
4. Design a system that aligns the inventory with strategic goals.
5. Establish data quality and handling standards for all data.
6. Update processes and systems to ensure quality.
7. Establish a communication and training plan.

I’ve found that as soon as you make a visual, like a graph that shows the data is capturing 5,000 feeder schools, for example, [school leaders] see this is not right ... layers will start to reveal themselves, but to do that you need good data.

A big advantage in strong data governance policies and the clean and clearly located data that results is in the ability to do longitudinal studies of how your school has changed — or not — over time. When you’re asking big questions like, “Should we grow the school?” it’s really helpful to know the accept rate, yield rate and net tuition revenue over many years, said Heilman. “Almost universally, schools find that after they changed systems a few years ago, they can’t access the data or the data is incompatible.”

So how do you convince school leaders to make the time? “I’ve found that as soon as you make a visual, like a graph that shows the data is capturing 5,000 feeder schools, for example, they can see this is not right.” That kind of visual quickly shows that the school lacks a unified system for recording feeder schools, e.g., St. Joseph’s Preparatory School might be listed as St. Joe’s, St. Joe’s Prep, SJP, Saint Joseph’s, etc. and appear as eight to 10 schools when it’s really one. When a school has a strong data team, strategy and culture, “layers will start to reveal themselves, but to do that you need good data,” said Heilman.

On the Ground

All this may seem like a lot to undertake on top of regular school operations, but schools of varied sizes and types are moving forward.

At Durham Academy (DA), a 1,200-student K-12 day school in Durham, North Carolina, the administration is making slow and steady progress. The school favors Veracross for its single record system. “Offices tend to be siloed, and it’s harder to tie things together when data lives in different places,” said Director of Technology Trevor Hoyt.

Hoyt and Data Systems Manager Anne Benson developed a detailed data map that shows where school data lives and how it flows across campus, initially for data security reasons. Cyber insurance sometimes requires this level of detail, and if the U.S. ever adopts privacy regulations like the EU’s GDPR, the map will be handy, said Hoyt. “You’re going to be scrambling if you don’t get in front of it,” he surmised. Making the map didn’t take too much effort, Benson reported — a planning session then meetings with different departments. And the map has additional benefits: “It’s a really good exercise because it’s eye-opening to see where the data is going,” Hoyt added.

DA’s Director of Strategic Initiatives Victoria Muradi brings together data from different parts of campus as part of her work. “Most schools collect basic data, but they may not be making connections between different pieces of data,” she said. “I see data governance as being able to ask: What are we doing with our data? Why are we doing it? How are we building an ecosystem around that?” she explained.

One example of drawing data-based connections: the school examines how students are or aren’t thriving by bringing together data on academic performance, attendance and engagement in school activities. “Connecting those things and visualizing it is part of my work,” Muradi explained. She might work with departments to ask: How many girls are in advanced science courses? How many students of color are in advanced math courses? How has that changed over time?

 We aren’t operating on a hunch or anecdote anymore. We audited the entire calendar and streamlined it so we could infuse what parents were asking for in the new calendar year.

She also develops, sometimes with outside help, surveys for the community. DA’s leadership has been able to move away from “a data dump of a ton of qualitative comments, which could lead to a biased view” towards “systematic analysis with the senior leadership team.” The result? “We aren’t operating on a hunch or anecdote anymore.” In one survey they learned parents wanted more information about what was happening in the classroom and more ways to connect but also fewer formal events. As a result, “We audited the entire calendar and streamlined it so we could infuse what parents were asking for in the new calendar year,” Muradi reported.

BBN hired an institutional researcher in 2019 for the same reasons — to make decisions informed by data rather than anecdote. They also wanted a deeper understanding of outcomes, for example, how students were truly prepared for life beyond school, beyond a simple tally of college acceptances. The school is rotating annual surveys of students, parents and faculty, which gives time for the school to act on the findings from the survey.

At Downtown School, the data lake house that Harper built informs many decisions. “It was work, but it set us up in a really good place because we now have one single source of truth for data exploration and institutional research.” One example: a faculty group called the Hubbub meets every week to discuss student progress. Through the data lake house, Harper has built a dashboard that pulls in data from the LMS, Blackbaud, accommodations tracker, Ravenna Admit and the College Board as well as survey data. “At a glance we can identify the top 20 students we need to be focusing on,” he said. What may be a quarterly review process at other schools is done much more regularly, which helps keep students on track.

When asked if being a small school was a disadvantage in the work, perhaps because there were fewer overall resources, Harper responded: “We have the advantage of less complexity than a lot of schools, and we’ve been deliberate in implementing systems from the beginning [just a few years ago]. So we don’t have to spend as much time retrofitting our systems to serve current needs.” The school also doesn’t have siloes, thanks to its unique leadership model, where each teacher also serves in an administrative capacity, so the faculty/staff is always in communication. “There’s a lot more transparency in terms of what we’re trying to do with our data,” Harper said.

A Whole New World?

Gault was hired at Stevenson to transform the way data operations worked at the school. He came directly from the company that built Slate, the market leader in higher education admissions and now advancement software. Before that he was at Yale, where he led web development at a time when it was transforming institutional business processes. Upon coming to Stevenson, Gault saw an opportunity to end the “Big Bang,” as he terms it, and bring school information back together in a centralized system where people could readily use it.

“Slate is a box of Legos,” he said. It can be deconstructed and reconstructed to fit any business operational need, as he sees it. While Wenzel and her team handle the network, technology hardware, cyber security and campus security technology, a separate team handles data operations, whose work is to understand what data and information different departments need and build a user-friendly solution for them within Slate. Gault and that team ask staff to “articulate your dream scenario” for accessing and analyzing data, which sounded “bizarre” when he began the transformation. “People are not used to thinking that way, and it took a tremendous amount of work” to change their mindset, he explained.

Initially, faculty would ask to buy a new piece of software to help them with some process, “and I had to be the bad guy and say, ‘Don’t buy it.’ Instead, you are going to talk to me. You think you don’t have time, but we’re going to make time.” Gault was determined not “to add another star to the constellation and have the Big Bang continue to expand.”

Now employees as well as parents can access what they call their personal “pirate page,” which displays the data they need — Stevenson’s mascot is the pirate, and the term connects the portal to the school’s culture. Parents, for example, can access payment and enrollment information and make transactions, and they can locate receipts for donations as well as academic information about their children. The school no longer has to spend hours chasing families down when it comes time for payments or agreements, Gault said. Processes like renewing car tags have become simpler and the data can be used across campus, by the advancement office, for example. Teachers can access student records, contact information, any important health information like allergies, accommodations and more.

If needs change, faculty and staff members can communicate with the data operations team. The director of residential life, for example, recently saw something on a colleague’s pirate page and asked for it to be built on hers to help with roommate assignments. Since then, she’s saved hours of administrative work, which can now be dedicated to developing relationships with students and programming, or other areas with more meaningful outcomes.

“We’re reversing that Big Bang mentality,” Gault said. “Now people are coming to us and they’re saying, ‘Hey, can I partner with you on building my business process?’” The new challenge is prioritizing requests and communicating the amount of time required to build out solutions, he said. He likens the process to building an intranet, acknowledging that it feels like they’ve “come full circle.” He’s also highly confident in the technology; upon returning from a Slate conference in late June, attended by 4,000 enthusiastic Slate users, mostly at colleges and universities, he believes the future is robust for the relational database.

Beyond a significant shift in thinking, these outcomes have required hiring support staff who know the Slate platform and can build out solutions. The school has been able to sunset a number of big-ticket platforms, which has provided some savings. But the ultimate measure of success, says Gault, is the improved way that leaders do their work.

Is it replicable? “We’re carefully constructing this in a way that it could be replicable in other schools,” said Gault. But “what’s absolutely replicable in other schools is the fundamental shift in philosophy about how systems should support institutions like this.” That is, staff and faculty shouldn’t have to adjust their processes to fit a product but rather build a system that works for the school and supports its specific processes.

The next frontier for Stevenson is layering AI on top of the centralized data. “I’m going to ask the most sophisticated questions of the institution, and I’m going to be able to get answers right away because all the data is in one system,” said Gault. Whereas before the thought was to hire a data analyst to make sense of the centralized data, now AI is being built into Slate, which will help analyze patterns in whatever data is within the system. Gault dreams of bringing maintenance data into the system, and the AI could generate replacement schedules, for example. “Because we are collapsing everything into a single system, it makes AI analysis so much easier,” he said. A whole new world indeed.