Blue Springs School District

"Creating an educational community in which each individual acquires knowledge, develops skills, and functions as a literate citizen to achieve personal goals."

Profile

The Blue Springs School District covers a total of 58 square miles and includes students from the communities of Blue Springs, Grain Valley, Independence, Lake Tapawingo and Lee’s Summit, Missouri. Annual enrollment is approximately 13,012 (a 45% increase since 1980). They are one of the fastest growing areas in the state, increasing their student body by 300 each year.

Client Requirements

Blue Springs needs multiple innovative applications in order to meet the school district’s vast technology requirements. With their tremendous growth and potential to continue to expand, they have decided to partner with AllofE Solutions to implement multiple advanced solutions. These applications are:

• A Content Management system to provide them with the ability to easily and fully control their web site content.
• A user friendly tool specifically designed to manage and track a school district’s Professional Development.
• A system that Maps Course Curriculum to national, state, and district level standards and benchmarks as well as helps to identify repetition and gaps in the district’s education process.
• A web based Job Application Management system that provides a convenient way to post jobs on your web site to allow applicants to apply online as well as gives administrators a user friendly tool for tracking and processing results.
• A Room Scheduling system to manage room reservations for each school in its district as well as its central office.

ContentM

A Content Management system to provide them with the ability to easily and fully control their web site content.

Our Solution

• Allows an organization to manage multiple sites from one centralized interface.
• Includes a Rich Text Editor for easy content formatting and updating with no technical or html knowledge.
• Provides “edit in place” content management through a user intuitive interface.
• Automatically generates the menu, pages, site map, and search information as content is added and updated.
• Allows school districts to manage individual school sites, teacher and classroom portals and more.
• Manages separate home pages for classes, faculty, and staff.
• Gives teachers an easy to use web site builder that integrates their site with the district and school’s site.
• Features advanced security that lets you restrict site administrative access.
• Provides a global search and replace to make site wide updates more efficient.
• Allows you to spell check your entire site at the click of a button.
• Simplifies changing the overall look and feel through a stylesheet and template editor.
• Connects menu items to pages, other Web sites, documents, collections.
• Helps users create tables and insert images and links into pages.
• Creates menu structures with infinite sub menu levels.
• Ensures that links and images across your site are working through a link validator tool.

Effects

With the completely user-friendly functionality of ContentM, very little training was required. Within a day the district’s administration was able to begin using the site and enter users and new site content. They were able to disperse site content responsibility across departments and user levels which allowed teachers to manage their own home pages and their class pages. The site gave students access not only to their school calendars and lunch menus but also to their class homework assignments. Each school was given the ability to manage their own content for their individual calendars, PTAs, and lunch menus. And all content could be previewed prior to ever appearing on the site which helped to ensure accuracy. The district was able to host and manage their own web-site with the most user friendly functionality for site wide spell checking, link validation, and search and replace tools to make the process quick and simple. Web-site management had never been easier and more reliable.

Inservice

A user friendly tool specifically designed to manage and track a school district's professional development.

Our Solution

• Customizes Fund Request, Leave Request, Evaluation, Feedback and Expense Reimbursement forms to match a district’s existing forms and processes.
• Allows for faculty and staff to submit requests for hours and credits online and then track their personal professional development portfolio.
• Provides a completely customized workflow that allows a district to define different approval processes for different types of activities, schools, requested dollar amounts and more.
• Includes an online catalog that allows teachers to instantly enroll in district workshops and activities.
• Generates reports for individual schools or for the entire district to track teacher hours and credits, event enrollments, substitute days and associated cost.
• Helps a district ensure that teachers meet professional development requirements.

Effects

This easy to use solution provided Blue Springs with an easy way of improving efficiency and accountability with their professional development process. It had been specifically designed to provide a completely customizable tracking solution for school districts. Blue Springs would now be able to track their progress towards HQPD, goals, standards, and improvement plans.

eCurriculum

A system that maps course curriculum to national, state, and district level standards and benchmarks as well as helps to identify repetition and gaps in the district’s education process.

Our Solution

• Provides comprehensive functionality for tracking and managing state standards, benchmarks, and indicators.
• Ties course curriculum to a state’s standards that are preloaded into the system such as Missouri’s Show Me Goals, Knowledge Frameworks and Grade Level Expectations.
• Manages course scope and sequence.
• Tracks student mastery of course objectives and goals.
• Provides the capability to automatically generate course guides to be published online, along with a dynamic web site based on the curriculum to share with parents and the community.
• Creates templates for the generated course guides and web site that match the district’s existing web site design.
• Generates curriculum maps and course guides in a document format that they can print and/or publish.
• Uploads lesson plans and attaches documents for each curriculum map objective.
• Tracks gaps and repetition in instruction.
• Provides links to Bloom’s Taxonomy.
• Customizes curriculum formats to individual schools or districts.

Effects

Blue Spring’s new curriculum management system provided them with a customized solution to manage their curriculum and share it with students, parents and the community. Educators at Blue Springs were able to use the system immediately because of how precisely the system replicated their original paper-based processes. The system was customized to meet specific needs of end users and has been welcomed by district teachers. These factors along with the efficient implementation of the system led Blue Springs to approach AllofE about expanding their system with an integrated Curriculum Mapping Solution.

Applicant Tracking

A web based Job Application Management system that provides a convenient way to post jobs on your web site to allow applicants to apply online as well as gives administrators a user friendly tool for tracking and processing results.”

Our Solution

• Provides a user-friendly tool to post jobs directly to a district’s web site.
• Allows prospective district employees to fill out and submit a job application form online.
• Allows administrators to log in and view the applications received, and then provide them with options for downloading and managing the applications.
• Gives applicants a way to upload a resume, cover letter, and other relevant documents to submit with their application.
• Customized to display online versions of the district’t former paper application forms.
• Contains the ability to filter and search applications using several different criteria.
• Provides client-specific forms which contain all information specified by the client, and conforms to any other requirements they might have.
• Allows the client to search their applicants based on the position or positions the applicant expressed interest in.
• Includes security that is customized according to the client’s needs.

Effects

With the new online applicant tracking system, Blue Springs was able to quickly and easily check for responses to their online application forms without any previous computer knowledge. Applicants were able to log on with their own ID and password and see the applications available to them, and easily fill out and submit the applications online. The system automatically stored each application and allowed administrators to search, export, and manage the applications. Applicant Tracking provided the district with an online job application system that completely transformed their virtual job application processes.

RmtraK

"A Room Scheduling system to manage room reservations for each school in its district as well as its central office.”

Our Solution

• Manages multiple campuses, buildings and locations for scheduling rooms.
• Allows anytime, anywhere access to request rooms and view room schedules.
• Works across platforms, browsers, and technical environments.
• Provides a user friendly interface for managing and scheduling rooms.
• Includes security with multiple access levels for administrators, room scheduler, and end users.
• Gives scheduling validation to prevent overbooking.
• Includes advanced searches to quickly and easily track room availability.
• The database driven system allows for the storage and utilization of content for multiple locations, regions, buildings, rooms, and graphical layouts.
• Categorizes events and provides complete calendar functionality for personal or organizational use.

Effects

With the rapid implementation of RmtraK, the Blue Springs School District was able to immediately reap the rewards of the online room scheduling and reservation system. The multi-level security allowed them to create user logins for employees of all levels. Some were given administration features for adding users, buildings, and room information, while others were given only reservation and scheduling functionality. Overbooking became a thing of the past and quick and easy scheduling the future.