With online learning on the rise, the District of Columbia Public Schools system has recently moved to a more modern way of collecting data on the whereabouts of students and the manner in which they have been receiving education.
Stephanie Davis, the deputy chief information officer for the District of Columbia’s state education agency, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), explained how D.C. has been managing its enrollment trends of students at an event entitled Qlik Public Sector Summit.
“During the pandemic, the D.C. mayor’s office and OSSE were concerned about the impact of students’ enrollment, and how we were going to fund LEAs [local education agencies] if student enrollment had dropped but yet LEAs needed to continue to provide support and educational support to students,” Davis said.
“So, we thought it be best to create an application called Enrollment Trends that gives them that data at their hand,” she added.
Originally, OSSE was being asked to provide information to the D.C. mayor’s office through more traditional means of storing data. However, the city then adopted the new data formatting technology through Qlik.
This new method of data gathering allowed OSSE to provide information to the D.C. mayor’s office to make informed decisions such as “keeping the schools open or closed as well as understanding the attendance of students throughout the school year,” Davis said.
According to the OSSE website, the office is required to collect “the yearly enrollment audit, investigating issues of non-residency, and facilitating the collection of tuition from non-resident students.”
