Student Information System
As a charter school, Pinellas Preparatory Academy lies in the “gray area” for many of the things that are absolutes for other schools. For example, PPA was required to keep information up to date in “SASI” (the SIS system used by Pinellas County Schools), but when I started, not all staff were allowed access to SASI. During my interview for the Principalship I was asked if I would be capable of developing a system to document information more effectively among the staff of PPA.
What I ended up developing, and refining over the last several years, is a very complex, user friendly Microsoft Access Database which serves as a SIS for our school. Some of the features of the current version of the Database are listed below, some of which have included screen shots. You may also view a gallery of all available screen shots from the database by clicking here.
- Has various user levels to allow/disallow some staff members from seeing information that does not apply to their role
- Demographic information for all students
- IEP/504 Plan for students who have them
- Parent and sibling information for all students
- Emergency contact information
- Allows office to find students based on their daily schedules
- Four separate commenting systems:
- Teacher comments – for teachers to make notes about student progress, issues which may be occurring, watching for patterns, etc.
- Parent contacts – to record contact and conversations with parents
- Office comments – to record information regarding enrollment, attendance, and various office information
- Administrative comments – not available to non-officer personnel, information regarding CPS reports, behavioral notes, etc.
- Manages student passwords for online services (i.e. Gradebook Wizard, Google Apps, Accelerated Reader, etc)
- Attendance
- Teachers enter attendance daily for their class
- Office has access to who is out
- Automatically emails families who have an unexcused absence
- Automatically emails and possibly issues consequences for tardiness
- Allows recording of students who leave late
- Calculates the total amount of time students have missed as a result of tardiness
- Creates a daily “truancy concern” list for students who may have met the requirements for truancy
- Behavioral
- Allows teachers to issue “COAs” (Consequence of Actions)
- Allows teachers to request an office referral
- Keeps attendance lists for detentions
- Records all student behavioral concerns
- Automatically emails any behavioral issue to parents
- Calculates if a student has been issued too many COA’s by teachers, disallowing them from issuing too many without a referral
- Lunch
- Allows teachers to enter lunch requests and amounts paid with morning attendance
- Produces a daily order list to send in regarding number of lunches required
- Produces a daily distribution list to hand out lunches in the lunch room
- Maintains balances for each student and amount due
- Automatically emails families with a balance due for lunch payments
- Before/After Care Attendance management
- Records daily attendance in the program
- Maintains balances for all students
- Emails balance due reminders to parents
- Produces special lists for staff people
- Birthday lists
- Homeroom Lists
- Grade Level Lists
- Manual Attendance Sheets
- Emergency Contact Sheets
- Locker Assignments
- Students with physical restrictions
- Students who have signed publicity releases
- Lists of students with IEP or 504 accommodations
- Specially formated export lists for online services (i.e. Gradebook Wizard, Connect ED, etc.)
- Manages field trips
- Streamlines the approval process for teachers wanting to take students on a field trip
- Allows teachers to manage fees for students
- Allows teachers to assign students to chaperones
- Print student lists with emergency information for each chaperone attending the field trip
- Creates email lists to email parents of multiple students
- Manages locker assignments and lock combinations
- Manages our student application process, lottery selection and waiting list
- Manages forms returned to school and missing forms
- Manages student fees (i.e. agendas, lockers, etc.)
- Manages volunteers (log in, record time, etc.)
- Produces lists and exports for entering information into SASI
- Manages IEP, 504 and EP renewal and due dates
