You might have noticed that the February poll was posted a few days ago, but one of our intrepid voters chose an "Other" option that made a lot of sense, so I reset the poll and included a new option to indicate approval of a minority of the board. I think it is quite fair to note that this is not an unanimous board by any means, and I can personally state that I DO have a great deal of confidence in a few members of the board.
Take a test drive and let me know what you think.
Friday, November 2, 2007
More with less
School's new system reduces costs 9 percent a year
Philadelphia Business Journal - by David Raths
Special to the Business Journal
Monday through Thursday, David Shulick is an attorney with his own Center City practice.
But on Fridays, Shulick spends the day at Delaware Valley High School, a for-profit alternative high school in Philadelphia for at-risk students, where he is president of the board.
"The law practice is quite lucrative," Shulick said, "but the school is my passion. I know where it is going to go. I also like working on educational policy at the state level and watching a vision become a reality."
Part of that vision is to wring inefficiencies from the school so that faculty and staff can devote more attention to helping troubled students.
With the School District of Philadelphia coping with a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall last year and the School Reform Commission recommending that $3 million be cut from Philadelphia's alternative education budget, Delaware Valley High School is one example of a school doing more with less.
Shulick and the school spent several years developing a proprietary software program that Shulick credits with saving the school $133,900 a year on an operating budget of $1.5 million. The electronic student management system, called Ksys, tracks student's academic, behavioral and social progress as well as many other metrics.
According to Shulick, the software drastically eases the paperwork burden on staff members, which allows them to accomplish far more in the same amount of time.
"The better the school is organized, the easier it is to care for kids," he said.
Created as a private school for at-risk students in 1969, Delaware Valley expanded in 1999 when the state legislature passed Act 48, which permits public schools to contract with private alternative education institutions. Operated by Unique Educational Experience Inc., it is now among the city's 18 alternative school arrangements, which take in students who have been expelled from the district for behavioral or academic problems. Standalone alternative schools are typically smaller than district schools and more structured and highly supervised.
Delaware Valley was one of the first approved providers under Act 48. Shulick served on the state Department of Education committee that helped shape the operating guidelines for alternative schools statewide.
The first school district to send kids to Delaware Valley was Bristol Township in 2002. Now the school serves students from 12 school districts, including 125 from the School District of Philadelphia. Located at 13550 Bustleton Ave., Delaware Valley High School has 12 teachers, five administrative staff members and close to 200 total students.
After passage of Act 48, the Department of Education realized it needed a means of monitoring the performance of these private alternative schools, which meant getting data on behavioral issues, attendance and academic performance.
Off-the-shelf software packages didn't capture the types of things school system administrators and state officials were looking for, Shulick said, so Delaware Valley agreed to be a proving ground for the development of a customized software package.
As Shulick began working with Elton, Pa.-based software developer KSys Inc. on the system requirements, he saw an opportunity to go beyond basic reporting and improve communications between staff members.
"There are so many delays between when a behavior happens and the time there's a response," he observed. "Myriad details are lost because there's no easy way to share notations. It's grossly inefficient."
Shulick sought to address those inefficiencies by having the behavioral and social support team at Delaware Valley use Ksys to enter and receive real-time updates on students, which in turn allows them to craft programs more in tune with students' needs.
"For example," Shulick said, "if our school psychologist is coming in, we can get him information in 10 seconds on all the kids who have had an anger incident between Sept. 1 and Oct. 15."
After four years of development and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested, Delaware Valley went live with the software in September 2005. The school retains all rights to the software, Shulick said.
Besides communications and reporting features, the software also is designed to cut down on the administrative workload. Mattie Thompson, the school's operations director, says that before Ksys was installed, it would take her many hours to create a roster of class schedules for all the students. Ksys does it almost instantaneously, she said. The software creates a roster, which she can then peruse and adjust.
"I double-check that the class is the right fit for the student, that they won't be too frustrated by the difficulty level," said Thompson, who calls the software "phenomenal."
Ksys contains a portal through which school district officials can access reports about the students. Each time a student is involved in an incident, the student's record is updated with a coded entry signifying the nature of the disturbance. "The school district can see what we've done to address the issue and the student's needs," Thompson said.
Also, officials can access the reports at their convenience. "Things can be crazy at schools during the day," said Thompson. "They can access it at 8 p.m. if they want to. Also, we send them weekly reports, such as attendance reports, via e-mail."
A spokesman for the School District of Philadelphia's Office of Transition and Alternative Education said officials there are aware of the reporting features but haven't had a chance yet to use them.
Shulick believes Ksys would provide benefits to all types of school systems, but he said that using the software requires changing business and educational practices. "The bureaucratic mentality of traditional public school systems would make this a very hard sell," he said.
The system contains some unique features, such as biometric fingerprinting that is used to cut down on administrative manpower when students are truant. As students arrive each morning they place their fingers on a scanner, which feeds their attendance information into Ksys. The computer system generates automated phone calls to the homes of kids who have not shown up.
Thompson calls the system a tremendous time saver. "Attendance is a major issue for all districts," she said.
Because the biometric system is time-stamped and dated, there is no arguing over the facts, she added. Students may be showing up every day, but if they arrive at 9:30 a.m. instead of 8:30 a.m. as they are supposed to, the system verifies that fact, and relays the information to parents and administrators.
Ksys is built on a Microsoft SQL relational database, said Larry Hershman, president of Advanced Network Services Inc. in Cherry Hill, which handles technology operations for the school.
Shulick came up with certain basic reports that can be run regularly, he said, but Ksys also has the capacity to run ad-hoc reports asking about anything, such as student performance by grade level or by classroom.
"David did a great job of defining functionality," Hershman said, "but one of the best things about the system is it's dynamic. As more educators use it, it is flexible enough to take their input into account."
The software also was created with scalability in mind, he adds, to allow for multiple locations within the environment.
Shulick says Delaware Valley may license the software to other alternative schools to recoup some of its investment. But first he wants to expand. "Our goal first is to replicate ourselves," he said. The growth plan includes a school in Bucks County expected to open in spring 2008, and then three more in Philadelphia and one in Delaware County by 2009.
"Services like this are desperately needed," he said. "We were asked to open one in New Orleans and in Maricopa County in Arizona, but I didn't want to spread ourselves too thin. I want to expand slowly and properly."