The following meeting notes were taken by Eric Tilton.
Attendees: Pete Summers, Deborah Odom, Cindy Tucker, Terri Pieretti, Sharon Hart, Eric Tilton, Kay Bertken
Kay Bertken, who has been engaged with the District since last year in analyzing its Student Transfers Processes, reported some recent data today about intradistrict transfers to the group. After having analyzed the data, Kay reiterated her view that there is an urgent need to capture, analyze, and understand the mobility of students throughout the District. We need to be able to measure the impact of this mobility on students and schools, and use this information in making better resource allocation decisions as well as for the development of strategies to mitigate the high level of 'churn' that exists in FUSD.
A number of departments throughout the district (DPI, State and Federal, Magnet Program, Special Ed, Discipline, etc.), are responsible for arranging transfers for a wide spectrum of reasons. We don't have a coherent view of all of those circumstances. There is also evidence, for reasons not well-understood at this point, that certain schools (Cooper Middle School was cited as an example) are hemorrhaging students at a significant rate. Another example was cited: at Roosevelt, there is a huge rate of turnover, but the total headcount typically remains relatively stable. This apparent stability masks the 'churn' that occurs in reality at Roosevelt. Where are the students going? Why are they leaving? what impact is the movement having on their academic performance?
There is not currently a rigorous, well documented system in place that allows the District to:
- regulate, coordinate, and track all transfers in a consistent fashion;
- answer questions about why transfers are occurring, or see what patterns there may be in student mobility;
- Quantify, by correlation with other data, what effects these transfers are having on education.
The ability to track transfers is hampered by fragmented responsibility and varied levels of recordkeeping among departments and school sites, as well as by inadequacies in existing business-critical tools (i.e. the MARS application, and mainframe screens and printed reports related to transfers.)
Existing tools do not capture, and can't provide real-time access to, the breadth of data that is needed to understand our mobility rates.
Having a rich set of accessible data would give the District the insight it needs to discover 'what is wrong' at certain sites that leads to high levels of exodus, 'what is right' at those sites that have high retention, and what the flaws in our policies and/or processes are that might be underlying drivers to the mobility problem.
It was agreed that part of the problem FUSD has with transfers is policy/process related; part of it is the lack of technology tools (databases) of the right design to facilitate and capture the data that we need.
Understanding of the correlations, trends, and patterns in the mobility data must come first; that requires data collection tools that are adequate to the needs of the parties involved. Only then can meaningful changes in policy, practice, and process and be made to mitigate churn.
Eric's comment: I have been working together with DPI (Benita Washington), Sharon Hart, and Malati Gopal for many months on scoping out process improvements and data collection tools for DPI. With the help of E-Design, we've already made a solid stride forward with a new tool for Sharon Hart to manage Magnet Applications and Open Enrollments, which is one piece of the transfers process.
I think that what needs to occur to move forward more vigorously with the rest is that the requirements document for the standard transfers processes (which already exists and is about 90% complete) needs to be completed to define the scope of the database/collection tools that are needed for that workflow, so that web-based data entry tools can then be developed by Information Technology or by an outside contractor such as E-design. A block diagram of the processes at DPI can be found here. An example of the requirements document that Eric worked on with Benita Washington for the TIP/SARB truancy process can be found here.
Next steps: Debra Odom and Terri Pieretti will re-engage with Malati to finish off the Transfers Process software requirements document; Eric Tilton will discuss with Kurt Madden approaches for accelerating the development of the web-based transfers process tools.