Changing the Way Teachers Teach and Students Learn: The Bronx Lab School Builds Inspiring Student Tracking Application on the Force.com Platform

"The Force.com platform is providing us with innovation we need to transform education at our school and other like minded schools across New York City. These schools have customized the platform to match school-specific programs for tracking daily student activity and progress, recording qualitative observations, exploring learning needs, and monitoring the success of intervention plans. It is this kind of revolutionary approach supported by revolutionary technology that is transforming education."


Challenge
  • The Bronx Lab School—a Bill and Melissa Gates foundation school in New York City for low income families--sought a tool to measure and track student performance
  • The school needed to hit a 90 percent attendance level in order to maintain the autonomy to make decisions regarding hiring, teaching, and learning independent of a regional superintendent 
  • An existing arcane legacy system generated inaccurate numbers that failed to reflect the actual number of students

Solution
  • Using the simple power of the Force.com platform, The Bronx School Lab easily built a customized solution with no IT support—deploying it to 12 users in one month
  • As a solution that is used throughout the day to manage student and school life, Salesforce provides real-time access to data on student progress and delivers daily updates to advisors, parents, and teachers
  • The solution tracks daily attendance, automatically sending email to parents when a child does not show up for school
  • Salesforce is the database from which administrators and teachers contact students; a Web page records calls home and attendance issues
  • A custom counseling tab helps the school social worker manage and track counseling sessions
  • The guidance counselor tracks grades and credits using Salesforce, running all transcripts through the app
  • The system also tracks demerits that indicate a student has violated one of the school’s core principles; alerts are automatically generated and sent to the principal when a child gets three demerits in one week
  • Dashboards track metrics, including weekly attendance averages and reasons for absences; demerit dashboards track what time of day these occur, who needs counseling sessions, etc.
  • A Homework tab will connect parents to the school Web site so they can see homework assigned to their children The school can quickly and easily add tabs as needed to keep the solution aligned with the school’s innovative culture

Results
  • The solution has transformed the way the school manages student information
  • The school stays on top of things like demerits and attendance; administrators and teachers can see trends and efficiently solve problems and enhance performance
  • Success of the application at The Bronx Lab School led to its use at 30 other similar schools in New York City
  • Salesforce is poised to become a digital portfolio for each student through their four years—recording not only attendance and behavior, but learning progress
  • The system will make it more effective to create reports required to attract future funding
 
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