“What’s the purpose for being in education? You have to love it and love working with kids. And the purpose of attendance is student success.”
Rocky Zepeda, District Coordinator for At-Risk Student Services, Del Valle ISD TX
PROFILE | Del Valle ISD, TX
Total students
11,238
Total schools
15
Student information system
Skyward
Just press print. Rocky Zepeda is District Coordinator for At-Risk Student Services at Del Valle ISD. “This system will generate that required notification, put it all together, all the data, merge it in an easy format to where the district just presses the print button and your notifications are provided and produced for you.”
Rocky Zepeda, although currently in the early stages of the process of rolling out the RaaWee system in his district, has in fact been talking with RaaWee for a number of years as RaaWee conducted a thorough preliminary study of what exactly school districts really needed and wanted in a system that would truly help school administrators do their jobs in the best possible way to better serve their students and communities.
Two Kinds of Experts
In conducting the research, there was a lot of investigative and exploratory collaboration. In school terms, RaaWee did their homework. “Yes, we shared information,” says Zepeda. “And at the beginning, when we first met with RaaWee, I made it very clear that they obviously were the experts in the systems, the technology and use of, and putting together the system—whereas, we were the experts in school attendance.”
The Making of an Effective & Efficient Product
“And so together,” Zepeda continues, “we shared information about how the system would be used, and for what purpose it would be used to ensure we’d be in
compliance with state requirements on attendance, and that their system would be able to produce what we needed effectively to meet those legal requirements.”
“A lot of Student Information Systems out there don’t focus on specific needs. If they do, it requires a lot of cumbersome data mining.”
In stark contrast, “RaaWee does all that for you in real time and allows you to focus on the real need of moving forward without spending a lot of man hours, time and effort,” says Zepeda.
“It definitely takes that collaboration in order to get an effective and efficient product for use in your district and for the purpose that you’re going to use it. And RaaWee worked very closely with me and we did a very good job of understanding those formats that needed to be put in place,” he says.
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