Poway Unified School District

Success Story

Novell will help Poway ensure that no child is left behind

Overview

The Poway Unified School District near San Diego, California operates more than 30 schools and is one of the largest school districts in the state. With 3,500 employees, Poway serves 33,000 students and is rapidly expanding to support a growing population.

Challenge

In order to use data to improve student learning, Poway needs accurate student information in each of its systems. With hundreds of people entering data in multiple databases, student information was often inconsistent across applications and a small IT team was spending months cleaning up dirty data. Poway wanted to implement a solution based on the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) standard for managing and reporting data in K-12 schools.

As part of its SIF solution, Poway recognized the need for robust identity and access management to comply with the security and reporting regulations for the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The legislation requires that schools track the progress of each student and provide regular updates to parents, teachers and administrators. Poway needed a secure identity management solution to give the right people the right access to confidential student information.

Novell solution

"Student learning is the center of everything we do - we have to make sure our students are learning every year. Without clean, secure data from our SIF and Novell solution, we would not be able to accurately track student assessment. This solution will help us focus more on educating, rather than technical issues."

Charlie Garten
Executive Director, Educational Technology and Information Systems
Poway Unified School District

Poway selected Novell consultants to implement its SIF solution, along with a Novell Security and Identity Solution consisting of Novell eDirectory and Novell DirXML.

"Every decision we make to give users access and deliver services is based on identity," said Charlie Garten, executive director of Educational Technology and Information Systems for Poway Unified School District. "Novell is a key player in supporting the SIF standard and offers the most mature, robust solution to manage identities across our cross-platform environment."

With the help of Novell consultants, Poway created a SIF pilot system in one of its schools by implementing Edustructures' SIFWorks (Zone Integration Server), SASIxp SIF Agent and Follett's SIF Agent. The solution is designed to provide a single point of entry for student data, eliminating hours of redundant data entry. Student information will automatically be populated across all SIF applications including those for food service, library, and network accounts so students will have immediate access to these services on the first day of school. The solution will also allow Poway to easily add new SIF agents into the system as they become available.

"Novell consultants had our pilot SIF program up and running in less than a day," said Marc Ludwig, systems engineer at Poway Unified School District. "By mid-afternoon, we were already transferring student information back and forth from a test database."

Student information will also be automatically updated in Novell eDirectory, allowing Poway to maintain a single user identity for each student. Using Novell eDirectory, Poway can integrate applications not yet SIF-enabled to leverage a common directory across all applications. The district also plans to use Novell DirXML to automatically update user information across all systems, saving endless hours of manual updating.

The Novell Security and Identity Solution will help Poway integrate with curriculum and assessment tools to track the progress of each student, a requirement for the No Child Left Behind legislation by 2006 in order to keep federal funding. Poway will also use a Novell Security and Identity Solution to provide students, parents, teachers, and staff with secure access to confidential information based on their identity.

Poway also uses Novell ZENworks to manage 9,000 workstations and 100 servers. In the past, a small IT staff spent nearly three months rolling out new applications to the entire district. Now the team can roll out an application in a day, without driving to a single school. Novell ZENworks also helps Poway keep an accurate inventory of hardware and software in order to comply with California's obsolescence plan for schools.

"Without Novell products, we would have to double our current staff to support our environment," said Ludwig. "It would be impossible for a team of six people to manage 33,000 users with any other solution."

Results

With the help of Novell consultants, Poway implemented a pilot SIF solution to streamline data management across its cross-platform environment and eliminate 70 percent of redundant data entry. Novell Security and Identity Solution will unify identity information across the district, significantly reducing administrative time and costs, and ensuring that the right people have access to the right information for each student.

"Student learning is the center of everything we do - we have to make sure students are learning every year," said Garten. "Without clean, secure data from our SIF and Novell solution, we would not be able to accurately track student assessment. This solution will help us focus more on educating, rather than technical issues."