01/17/2007

Information Builders today announced that the Omaha Public School District will use WebFOCUS to provide critical support to the district as it works to meet federal and state educational accountability mandates, such as the No Child Left Behind initiative.

ebizQ received the following details:

WebFOCUS will transform the way teachers and administrators access results of the Criterion-Referenced Test (CRT), a crucial student assessment tool for the Omaha Public Schools in Omaha, Nebraska. The WebFOCUS system will also provide the district with the ability to integrate CRT results with data from other key sources, such as the databases for national standardized tests. The result will be more detailed and meaningful analysis of the district's progress. That analysis is crucial both for compliance efforts and for effectively serving the educational needs of Omaha's students.

"The mandates are important but we're really looking to get information for the students," said David Patton, technical support coordinator in the Information Management Services (IMS) division at the Omaha Public Schools. "We do needs-based assessments so we can meet those needs. We want to know where each child is doing fine and where that child could use some help. We want to be able to break that information out in meaningful ways as quickly as possible. The beauty of the WebFOCUS system is that, besides making it easier to gather the CRT data and report on it, WebFOCUS makes it so easy to bring in information from other sources."

To access the online reporting system, created using WebFOCUS Maintain and WebFOCUS Developer Studio, authorized users will only need a browser and a network connection. Once in the system, they will be able to either easily input CRT data or immediately create reports about the performance of schools, classes or individual students. When the rollout is complete, more than 3,500 teachers will use the WebFOCUS system, allowing customized curriculum improvements to meet the needs of each child based on classroom-specific data.

"We're enabling data-driven decision-making for student achievement,” added Patton. "This will help us improve the overall curriculum as well as determine how to address each child's needs. WebFOCUS helps us pull many reporting and analysis activities into one streamlined process.”

The new system will replace a laborious procedure that involved the processing of 300,000 scan sheets a year, each of which had been manually filled out by a teacher. Using the old system, the school district's research division created CRT reports and delivered them to each teacher, a time-consuming process. With the development and implementation of the WebFOCUS system, the Omaha Public Schools can ensure that no child will be left behind.

"By using WebFOCUS, teachers and administrators can immediately view and analyze data critical to improving student performance,” said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. "Omaha Public Schools are a leading example of how technology can help enrich the education system and provide teachers with more real-time insight.”