The Arizona Department of Education’s (ADE’s) IT division announced that it has reached yet another milestone today. The award-winning Arizona Education Data Standards system (AzEDS), which has become the industry model for collecting, storing and managing education data, has executed the most efficient annual rollover in the state’s history.
AzEDS currently serves 1.1 million students throughout the state, processing more than $5 billion in state aid to more than 2,575 public and charter schools. This shift has allowed local education agencies (LEAs) to know their estimated state aid payments on a daily basis, as opposed to months later.
“I have been extremely impressed with AzEDS since our district began working with it last year,” Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Chandler Unified School District Lana Berry stated. “Since the majority of our funding comes from this system’s reports, the accuracy of the numbers are really critical to our school district getting accurately paid.
“Any problems we had were identified quickly, and to be fair, most of those problems were from the old system; not from AzEDS. We need to support AzEDS and ADE because we will be using this funding system for many years to come.”
Not only has ADE’s IT division completed its rollovers to the new fiscal year in a punctual manner, but AzEDS has met legislatively mandated reporting deadlines, granted schools unseen access to their system at the beginning of the year and offer end-of-year calculations for the first time. Public and charter schools now also follow the same month-to-month payment schedule, which allows schools to budget with more accuracy, saving the state millions of dollars annually.
“We really appreciate ADE because this transition has been a positive change for Chandler and for all Arizona schools,” Berry said. “Since we have one of the largest school districts in Arizona with 45,000 students, as well as the staff and technical personnel to provide good feedback, we made for an ideal testing group and partner for ADE. (Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction) Diane Douglas, (ADE Chief of Staff) Michael Bradley, the technology staff and everyone else at ADE have been very supportive and committed to find solutions to any problems since day one.”
In order to create a best-in-class student data system and meet the legislative demands on the state’s education system, ADE IT scaled to a near instantaneous processing speed and adjusted the capacity of the system to meet the demand of 6-9 million transactions per day. By providing this real-time visual feedback to educators, ADE is accomplishing its main objective, which is to assist educators in using data to drive instructional decisions in the classroom.