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STEVENS POINT, Wis. (Oct. 4, 2016) – Skyward, a K-12 school administrative software provider, announces its partnership with Michigan’s Technology Readiness Infrastructure Grant Program (TRIG) for a project designed to improve the exchange of information among stakeholders who are responsible for improving student achievement.
For years, school districts throughout Michigan have been using a variety of different systems to manage their student information, food services, transportation, special education, assessment data, and more. Sharing data among those disparate systems often resulted in a massive duplication of effort and added expenses because districts needed to purchase or develop home-grown data-bridging services.
TRIG’s Data Integration Activity project aims to eliminate these issues by establishing five regional data hubs to standardize student data being used across all applications. Moving forward, Michigan districts using Skyward and other participating SIS vendors, will experience a significant time savings on data integrations, resulting in reduced costs. In addition, the integrations will result in improving the quality and consistency of data so district technology personnel will experience fewer interruptions due to solving integration issues.
“One of the biggest challenges facing school districts is the interoperability of their student data while also maintaining proper data security,” said Ray Ackerlund, chief marketing officer at Skyward. “By participating in the Data Hub project, we’re making it possible for districts to integrate data more efficiently while ensuring that districts maintain control over what data is shared.”
Once integrated with their regional data hub, districts will be able to take advantage of third-party integrations, data quality reporting, dashboards, single sign-on (SSO), and state reporting capabilities as they are completed and approved. Data hubs will serve as a conduit for the exchange of data between systems based on an industry-leading standard data format provided by the Ed-Fi Alliance to make sure the data in all systems is complete, accurate, and up-to-date. The security of the data will continue to be controlled locally by each district.
Feedback from districts that have already completed the transition indicates that the data hub project will successfully exceed the expectations of Skyward’s 194 K-12 customers throughout Michigan.
“By participating in the data hub, our district is putting ourselves in position to share data accurately with other systems, as well as receive data from other districts that may use different systems than we do,” says Ryan Miller, academic data specialist at Portage County Schools in Kalamazoo. “Skyward has been on the leading edge of cooperation in this project and their willingness to invest time and effort into complying to the data hub requirements has been instrumental in getting the program up and running.”
For more information on integrating Skyward with their local data hub, Michigan districts can visit the TRIG website at 22itrig.org.