Technology Consulting in the Community Spring 2018 Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania www.cmu.edu/tcinc Environmental Charter School Executive Summary Student Consultant, Tejas Bisen Community Partner, Todd Hoffman I. About the Organization Environmental Charter School (ECS) was founded in 2008 by a small group of inspired parents and community leaders at Frick Park. The mission of ECS is: The mission of The Environmental Charter School at Frick Park is to educate each student to high academic learning standards using a themed curriculum that will foster knowledge, love of and respect for the environment and the will to preserve it for future generations. ECS is a Pittsburgh Public School (PPS) and currently serves around 600 students from grades K-8 and has around 100 employees in the organization. It is a tuition free K-8 Charter School that combines the academic rigor of the best public schools with a “multi-disciplinary, "out-the-door" learning approach rooted in real world problems that build active, engaged, and empathetic citizens”. ECS is doing incredibly well and will be expanding to include grades 9-12 in the coming years. Todd Hoffman, the director of IT at ECS has a significant role to plan and implement technology to meet the rapid growth of ECS. II. Improved Student Learning Using Student Analytics ECS is focused on providing students with high academic learning standards and already has all the possible manual processes to provide the same in the form of excellent teachers and academic coaches. Complementing this manual process, ECS wanted a centralized data warehouse coupled with powerful analytics and data visualization layer to empower the teachers and academic coaches to take informed decisions for improving student learning. Current Applications at ECS have limited analytics and data was stored across various platforms in different formats. Data for quarterly and yearly exams was being manually entered by teachers in Google Sheets. Student behavior issues were going unaddressed due to lack of information/communication among teachers. All these issues/opportunities were the main drivers of this engagement and the CP wanted a strategic plan and solution to achieve student analytics and improve student learning. Following was the high-level requirement as conceived through discussions: Defined Goals & Prepare/Manage Generate Improve Student Collaborate Data Insights/Alerts Learning Environmental Charter School Page 1 of 2 Tejas Bisen, Student Consultant April 22, 2018 III. Outcomes The most important outcome of this project is a direction for ECS to create student analytics and improve student’s learning experience. For this process, a standardized template was created for keeping the data in a format that can be easily accessed from the visualization layer. ECS now has capability for building visuals from their data independently. The second most important outcome is improved alerting and information among teachers about student behavior using tools and chatbots. Overall, this feature has increased effective communication between teachers and academic coaches. A good way forward is required to integrate data from Eschoolplus into the outcome of this engagement to make the solution even more effective for ECS. IV. Recommendations ECS’ vision of improved student learning experience can definitely be achieved with a right mix of technology and effective communication between all stakeholders. It is important for ECS to collect all data points generated by students daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly. Also, a student’s learning is not limited to school but a great percentage of it happens at home as well and the best way forward is to keep parents informed about their ward’s progress and day to day activities at school. Keeping this in mind, ECS should have the following goals for the near future: 1) Implement Technology for Information Access and Real-time Communication for Parents The overall information being gathered should ultimately be formatted, analyzed and presented to Parents. Informed parents can take concrete steps towards helping their ward to improve and this can lead to a better learning experience for students. 2) Achieve Data Autonomy and Migrate to Google Apps for Capturing Classroom Data Students create a lot of data points everyday and it is imperative that if a school wants to analyze these data points, it should have a plan to collect these data points effectively and manage its data and have full control on the whole process. This equips the school with flexibility on the way they want the analytics to work and they have better autonomy on data. Considering ECS uses a lot of Google Apps for Education, it will save a lot of expenditure if ECS uses all Google Apps to their fullest extent. The above recommendations are small stepping stones for making ECS a technology powered school that empowers different stakeholders with relevant information through its Analytics Platform. Community Partner About the Consultant Todd Hoffman Tejas Bisen [email protected] [email protected] Environmental Charter School Tejas is a graduate student in Information 100 N Braddock, Suite 301 Systems at Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15208 (CMU). He is actively looking for a job http://www.ecspgh.org in Technology Consulting. Environmental Charter School Page 2 of 2 Tejas Bisen, Student Consultant April 22, 2018 Environmental Charter School Final Consulting Report Student Consultant, Tejas Bisen Community Partner, Todd Hoffman I. About the Organization Organization Environmental Charter School (ECS) was founded in 2008 by a small group of inspired parents and community leaders at Frick Park. It is a Pittsburgh Public School (PPS) and serves students in grades K-8. The mission statement of the organization is as follows: The mission of The Environmental Charter School at Frick Park is to educate each student to high academic learning standards using a themed curriculum that will foster knowledge, love of and respect for the environment and the will to preserve it for future generations. ECS has a guiding principle they believe in: Catalyst, Character, Collaboration, Commitment(4Cs). One of the beliefs of their instructional pillar is “teaching and learning is accountable, measurable, and focused on continuous improvement”. ECS has about 600 students from grades K-8 and around 100 employees in the organization. It is a tuition free K-8 Charter School that combines the academic rigor of the best public schools with a “multi-disciplinary, "out-the-door" learning approach rooted in real world problems that build active, engaged, and empathetic citizens”. They have recently got permission to expand the school to have more grades and accommodate more students from the waitlist and eventually have total four school buildings to serve students from K-12 grades by 2020. Todd Hoffman, Director of IT, at ECS has a crucial role to chart out strategies for ECS’s IT and digital needs, as the school embarks on its path of rapid growth. Facilities ECS has three different buildings (two schools and an administrative office) 1. Lower School (309 South Braddock Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15221) Lower School is for K-3 students and staff, which is three-story building. 2. Upper School (829 Milton Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15218) Upper School is for 4-8 students and staff, which is three-story building. 3. Home Office (100 North Braddock, Suite 301, Pittsburgh, PA 15221) Home Office is the rented space for home office team, which located on 3rd floor inside the building of other school (Shady Lane School). Environmental Charter School Page 1 of 12 Tejas Bisen, Student Consultant April 22, 2018 Braddock School Milton School Home Office Programs The primary function of ECS is to provide an authentic learning curriculum for students from grades K-8th that shapes them to be problem seekers, critical thinkers, and thoughtful innovators. Authentic learning involves real world tasks and tools and includes integrated subjects, project- problem-place based learning along with KDB (Knowing, Doings, beings) framework. ECS provides the Extended Day Program: E-Day, a tuition-based after school program that provides a safe and fun environment for students to play, study, and engage while parents finish up their workdays. The program is active at both upper and lower schools, serving students from K-8th grade. It also has a Drop in Child care facility that it provides along with the E-Day program. It also offers various clubs and afterschool activities throughout the year for students. The afterschool activities include field trips, Basketball clinics and a plethora of other activities to help students develop overall. ECS also provides breakfast and lunch program to its students which can be categorized into paid, subsidized and free depending on the student. Staff The Staff is divided and led by each line of service. Jon McCann is the CEO of ECS who provides leadership along with Directors for each line of service and oversee managing the organization. The line of service broadly includes – Technology, Business, Innovation, Assessment & Accountability, Facilities and Athletics. Each School Building (Upper School & Lower School) has a Principal, Assistant Principal, Office Manager and Teachers who are responsible for running the day to day operation of the school. The teachers teach, grade and take attendance for students. The schools also have coaches that provide additional help to teachers in each specialized area, such as Math, Science, Design, Integration, Literacy and Technology. Technology Infrastructure Environmental Charter School Page 2 of 12 Tejas Bisen, Student Consultant April 22, 2018 ECS has a hybrid infrastructure but mainly uses Cloud. The infrastructure is made up of Google cloud services and a local network server. All the three school buildings have WiFi as well as connection ability through wired Lan. The staff mainly uses Google Cloud applications like Google Drive, Google Sheets for File Storage at organization level and their personal computers to store file locally.