Broken Arrow Public Schools, the largest suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has chosen the Mizuni District Solution to meet its information needs. With nearly 17,000 students enrolled on 23 campuses, Broken Arrow was searching for a solution that could ease the heavy burden of state reporting and equip educators with key student data.
"We chose the Mizuni District Solution based on testimonials from other school districts that were using the Mizuni products," said Cathy Brown, Assistant Director for Student Management at Broken Arrow. "Our district staff was impressed by how much easier state reporting would be with Mizuni's automated processes. We also liked the fact that, because of the data interoperability enabled by the product, we wouldn’t have to interfere with the process of transmitting data back and forth from our student information system."
Less than a year after implementation, Broken Arrow says the product has made it much easier to meet Oklahoma's state reporting requirements, allowing staff to submit high-quality data on-time and in the right format. "The ease of transmitting data to the state data system, the WAVE, and providing our state reports is key. The benefits from relieving our network from time-intensive reporting have been outstanding," said Brown. "Mizuni has also enabled our district to extract and receive data from several different platforms and applications that would not be able to communicate in a standalone environment," added Brian Daley, Executive Director of Technology for Broken Arrow Public Schools.
Brown says that because Mizuni's dashboard is so intuitive, "No longer does a casual user have to be an expert in our student information system to gain information and run reports." Broken Arrow also likes how quickly the product extracts data to generate timely school and district-wide reports, and the easy access it provides to student information such as current and historical grades, attendance, and schedules. "Combine all that with the access to student test scores and that is the total package,” said Brown.
“Before Mizuni, we were a spreadsheet-driven school district," Daley explained. "It used to take way too long for administrators to get the information they requested and by the time they received it, it was already dated. Data integrity was also at risk as too many individuals were manipulating the data that was entered into multiple spreadsheets and databases with uncommon structures. By replacing a rather archaic method of capturing data with 21st century technology, we're now able to meet the needs of administrators, teachers, students, and parents when a request is made. And in most cases, we can meet these needs instantly," said Daley.
