Bordering the sky–blue waters of Minnesota's beautiful Lake Minnetonka, the Westonka Public School District prides itself on an outstanding record of student performance, consistently ranking among the state's top schools for standardized test scores, and standing as one of 22 Minnesota districts to be recognized as "Academic Outperformers" by the prestigious Standard and Poors School Evaluation Service. With an ongoing commitment to the highest standards of academic excellence, Westonka is also a technological innovator, taking full advantage of the latest tools in the classrooms and in the administrative sector, tools that include FileMaker Pro database systems.

Business Challenge

With over 2000 students, 175 teachers, and 100 support staffers spread over four schools, the district might seem small compared to its big–city counterparts. But that doesn't mean the challenge of managing the day to day flow of student information is any less difficult — in fact, it might even be more so, given the demands on staff time and the limited budgets facing a smaller district.

That's where Grandview High School band teacher Roger Whaley thought he could help out. He's a long–time FileMaker Pro enthusiast, using the software for his own projects, and came up with a creative way to use the application to keep his own student information organized, building a solution that stored actual MP3 clips of student performances along with more conventional instructional data. And then the administration realized there might be an even wider use for Roger's idea. "We were swimming in data," he recalls. "We had state tests and local tests, and No Child Left Behind makes these tests very important. I didn't want teachers spending any more time than necessary to understand those scores, so when the principals asked me to help, I said yes. They needed the ability to make a clear and concise report about each student as an individual — try doing that in a spreadsheet!"

Successful Solution

Using his original band–class application as the seed, Roger built a district–wide FileMaker Pro data management solution that allows elaborate and detailed breakdowns of test data by student, by classroom, by school, and district–wide. Roger originally designed the solution in three separate files containing over 2400 records each, but with the recent migration to FileMaker Pro 8.5, he's planning to streamline the system into a single powerful file. Especially vital to the district, which operates on both Macintosh and PC platforms, the application is fully capable of cross–platform operation.

FileMaker Pro may be the most important program on my computer. I'd have a hard time finding a replacement as easy to use. I can build the forms, import the data, and pass it along to the people who need it. I can write scripts and create buttons for repetitive tasks to create a tool thatI's a real time–saver — it's all that easy with FileMaker Pro!

— Roger Whaley, database developer, Westonka Public School District