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Union City Board of Education
FileMaker Pro is Administration Ace at Union City Board of Education
The city, which is 1.4 miles square, faces a double challenge: a
large population of students whose first language is not English,
and is part of the state's "Abbott” system, an outgrowth of a state
Supreme Court ruling that brings additional funding. The Union City
school district is under a mandate from the State of New Jersey not
only to provide optimal education, but also to track and verify the
effectiveness of program spending.
During the past four years, that information management challenge
has increasingly been met by the use of FileMaker Pro, a
cross-platform solution. Utilizing the expertise of two FileMaker
Solutions Alliance (FSA) members, Union City has turned the old
school chant of "no more pencils, no more books” into a happy
refrain of "no more paper – it's in FileMaker.”
That shift from paper to pixels came about in large measure because
of the state demands, said Anthony Dragona, business administrator
for the Union City Board of Education.
"All of our schools … were given the charge of having to develop
school-based budgets,” he recalled in a recent interview. This
required a "new management style that would create management teams
on a school level, schools would develop their own personalities,
through choosing a model and developing a needs assessment and
operations to support that plan.”
Instead of concentrating data at the Board of Education, where
allocations and decisions could be made, the information had to
shift to the schools, Mr. Dragona said.
"We had to provide the schools with tools that would help them make
decisions that would best impact a child's education,” he
noted.
In turn, this meant taking the data and making it available to
administrators in the schools.
"Four years ago, we entered into agreement with [FileMaker
developer School Base], it was 30-something databases,” Mr. Dragona
said. "Today, we're up to over 90 databases. We took a customized
solution and it gave us what we needed at that time with expansion
capability for the future.”
Using School Base, the Union City board could track staff and
demographic data, salaries, assignments, and from there, the
district could enter into a five-year salary contract with its
employees – a first for the city. Now, through the use of
FileMaker, the board could see a five-year projection and know what
salary costs would be through that period.
Almost all major aspects of running a modern public school system
are helped with Union City's FileMaker implementation. Field trips
for classes, once mired in a flurry of paper forms, can now be
proposed and requested online, with e-mails going to appropriate
Board of Education and transportation department personnel to both
approve the trip and schedule the use of a school bus. Attendance
data from a telephone-entry system, used by the staff, is funneled
into FileMaker for recordkeeping and analysis, and can be consulted
when preparing employee evaluations.
The evaluations themselves, required between two and four times a
year for each teacher, are now completed by principals and
administrators visiting each classroom, equipped with a notebook
computer and wireless (802.11b) antenna. The evaluation is filled
out on the computer and can later be accessed by administrators as
part of a "teacher profile report” that covers every aspect of a
teacher's job; many of these records include a digital photo of the
instructor.
Everett "Mac” McCassey, who heads FSA-member firm Schoolbase in
Auburn, NH, and is in Union City for several days each month, said
executives of the Board of Education are constantly amazed at how
quickly he is able to fulfill their requests, sometimes within
minutes or an hour, for new features or view of data.
In Union City, Mr. McCassey said, "they have better access to their
own information, better control of it, eliminating duplicate data
entry, and greatly increasing the accuracy of their information”
thanks to FileMaker.
Aileen Silver of Possible SOLUTIONS Inc. in Monroe, NY, was
instrumental in bringing Schoolbase to Union City, and has worked
closely with Board of Education Human Resources Supervisor Michael
DeNicola to help craft appropriate solutions that meet particular
needs.
One system in which Mr. DeNicola was involved allows the Board of
Education to track professional development activities for
teachers, each of whom is required to accrue 120 hours of credit
every five years.
Using FileMaker, the school system is able to relate the
professional development activities to each teacher's work
assignments, and can also measure the impact of these programs on
student achievement.
In cases where teachers and other staff perform additional duties
(after-school classes, lunchtime supervision, etc.), administrative
staff can enter records for each work, which can then be approved
with an electronic signature by principals. The pay records then
feed into both the board's payroll and budget systems.
As a matter of fact, the Union City Board of Education will, this
year (2002), have its budgets into state officials on time,
prepared largely with FileMaker, before the numbers are transferred
to state-supplied spreadsheets.
"Quickly we are able to use FileMaker by pulling in staff data,
insurance data, benefits, etc., to develop 95 percent of the budget
in FileMaker,” Mr. Dragona said. "It's a database but it's friendly
enough to develop calculations.”
Where some in the school system may have been skeptical about the
power of FileMaker to deliver for a demanding, decentralized school
system, the Union City Board of Education now firmly believes in
the power of a single software package to change the way it does
business. Mr. Dragona is an active member of FSA, a regular at the
annual FileMaker Dev Con (developer's conference), and is
evangelizing others in his administration to tap into FileMaker's
multidimensional capabilities.
"My feeling is, if you can dream it, FileMaker can do it,” he said.
Contact information
Contact Info for Customer:Anthony Dragona
Business Administrator
Union City Board of Education
Tel.: (201) 348-5677
E-mail: adragona@union-city.k12.nj.us
Aileen Silver
Possible SOLUTIONS Inc.
Tel.: (914) 783-4276
E-mail: neelia1@aol.com
Everett S. McCassey
School Base
Tel: (603) 483-2995 or (800) 999-6996
E-mail: mccasseye@school-base.com
Filemaker Contact:
Kevin Mallon
Public Relations Manager
FileMaker Inc.
408-987-7227
kevin_mallon@filemaker.com
http://www.filemaker.com
- Charged with transferring individual school budgets from a central office to the 12 individual schools, the Union City, N.J., Board of Education relies on FileMaker Pro to power the flow of data from input to reports. As a result, principals and administrators get hands-on control of many functions and the district's budget is completed on time in a state-approved format.
- K-12 Education