Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) has implemented GuideK12 geovisual analytics, which allows the district to geographically explore and analyze school district data.
M-DCPS turned to GuideK12 to identify geographic trends and patterns occurring in the district. GuideK12 aggregates disparate data sets and visualizes the information to allow analysis on a range of needs such as language, economic, academic, building capacity, or special services.
“GuideK12 provides us with such a shift by presenting a geo-dimension to our data, so we can draw conclusions in a different way. We can now visualize students linked to the household so patterns and groups emerge geographically that before would have been hidden in a spreadsheet or report,” states Debbie Karcher, Chief Information Officer, Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
Karcher said it was important to understand the composition of the families in their community and to analyze scenarios to develop effective programs. GuideK12 allows the district to identify patterns and offer new choices to parents. Positive communication between the district and parents is vital to developing trust and fiscal support that fosters a shared understanding of the district initiatives and goals.
For districts across the nation, understanding the impact of school choice and the movement of students is a challenge to track. With a district of approximately 365,000 full-time and part-time students, like Miami Dade with a high transfer rate, it is an even bigger challenge. Miami Dade is using GuideK12 to understand the trends for students transferring in and around the district and to assess programs to meet their needs. Now the district can quickly adjust when there is a large influx of students from another country due to natural disaster or turmoil in their country and assess the needs and programs required for the new population.
“Our boundary process was cumbersome prior to using GuideK12,” said Charlene Burks, Administrative Director Federal & State Compliance Office. “Now we can do “what if” scenarios that are so easy to do and pull all the data in a fraction of the time. When the district stakeholders saw that we no longer have to go to multiple sources, that we can see our student demographics very clearly and that we can target progress they all agreed that this was a product for us.”
