Hopkins Public Schools has been using the geovisual analytics software platform from GuideK12 to track enrollment patterns. The effort is aimed at anticipating future enrollment numbers and administrative needs for the district, as well as to prepare for the rare instances of petitioned community annexation.
Tracking and anticipating enrollment patterns helps districts with open enrollment to properly plan resource needs and capacity. Hopkins had experienced an increase, exceeding projections, in their kindergarten populations. The ability to not only geo-locate their students, but also to see the data represented in interactive visual charts and graphs allowed the district to better accommodate the future needs of particular schools.
“We can find geographical information in our Student Information System, but it is all in rows and columns. Being able to visualize the data and interact with it, through the GuideK12 platform, brings new insights to our administrators that numbers on paper just could not,” said Sid Voss, Director of Educational Technology, Media and Information Systems.
Hopkins Public Schools stretches across several suburbs and serves approximately 7,200 students. One suburb has recently seen residents petitioning to have their community reassigned to a neighboring school district. These types of requests require a tremendous amount of research, data and time to inform an accurate projection of the affects of said move. In this case, Hopkins needed a quick and accurate property analysis of the community in question and how the move would affect student counts.
“Using the data, we were able to convey to the school board the potentially negative affects of changes in district boundaries.” said Voss.
GuideK12 is an integrated, web-based software that helps school districts consolidate and understand their data. Geovisual analytics is a new technology that turns data into actionable information via visualization on an interactive map.
“Our address data is now over 99% accurate; we know good decisions require good data,” said Voss. “Access to information and data is becoming increasingly important for school district administrators whether it is data for fiscal analysis, student achievement, demographic or socio-economic insight.”
