Covering a geographical area roughly the size of Rhode Island, the Albuquerque Public School District is the 25th largest educational jurisdiction in the United States. With more than 11,000 employees, it is one of the largest individual employers in the state of New Mexico. For such a far–ranging operation, efficient management is necessary, and with the arrival of the new FileMaker Pro 8, those needs will be met even more effectively.

Business Challenge

For every school district, there are basic information management issues, facts and figures which must be collected, collated, documented, and reported, from data on individual students to details of daily administrative functions. That is even more so for a vast operation like the Albuquerque Public School District. "Our needs are the same, only magnified," comments Instructional Cluster Assistant Ken Tuley. "We have many more uses for a quality database." Some of those uses include tracking student discipline reports, documenting visitors to the various schools, cataloguing items stocked in the district warehouse, and bus scheduling, which requires detailed tabulations of class schedules to ensure each educational day meets state requirements, and preparing Educational Plans for Student Success, a school's roadmap to improved instruction.

The district turned to FileMaker Pro nearly a decade ago, and has implemented each successive update of the software to the present. "The need for a cross–platform solution led us to FileMaker Pro," Ken continues. "A tremendous bonus was the ability to web–publish these databases, thus making information available to the more casual users in the district, those who just needed to look up information."

Successful Solution

The district maintains individualized FileMaker Pro databases for each function. "Each solution is unique to the challenge," Ken states. "Some are web–enabled, allowing staff to input or retrieve appropriate data, but as our solutions get more involved and complicated, we're doing less web publishing and more pure FileMaker Pro solutions. But I expect we'll move back toward the web due to the improvements in security and Instant Web Publishing that are now available."

The feature I'm most excited about is the tab feature. In my current solutions it took multiple layouts to get all the information on the screen. Now, with tabs, I can do it in one layout. Talk about simplifying things!

— Ken Tuley, Instructional Cluster Assistant, Albuquerque Public Schools — Manzano Cluster

Today the district's FileMaker Pro server handles a total of 70 files, covering over 40 individual solutions, Other solutions operate locally, meeting the needs of specific schools in the district, but are not distributed system–wide. FileMaker Pro developer Marcus Silving of Phoenix–based Waves In Motion provides valuable development assistance.