Long-awaited student data system has lift-off

Sixty-eight local school districts have linked into the data system in recent weeks, including Atlanta Public Schools and the metro county systems of Hall, Fayette, Paulding, Henry and Coweta, said Matt Cardoza, spokesman for the state Education Department.

Most of the rest of the state is expected to be on board by April, said Bob Swiggum, deputy superintendent of technology services.

The student information system endured so many false starts and setbacks that educators were skeptical.

"We really didn't think it was going to happen," Carolyn Oliver, student information systems coordinator for the Paulding County School District, said Monday during a demonstration for the news media.

The state has been trying on and off since at least the early 1990s to launch the student information system. Lawmakers were so frustrated in 2005 that they granted millions to local school systems to develop data systems of their own, Swiggum said.

The turning point came in April 2009, when Georgia won an $8.9 million federal grant and brought in Swiggum -- a retired Georgia Pacific executive -- to address the system's shortcomings.

The state system enables teachers, principals and school administrators from local school districts to access data on their students, as well as on students who have just transferred from other districts within the state.

By 2014, the goal is to have school districts in Georgia and all its border states sharing information on students who have attended their schools, Swiggum said. Eventually, the plan is to track students from kindergarten through college and to allow parents to access the data, as well.

Cartess Ross, principal at Paulding County's Dobbins Middle School, said educators now can compare a student's performance to the average for his or her school, district and state. The data also will go a long way in helping educators detect trends in student performance and attendance, Ross said.

"This data is so extremely important, not only at the classroom level, but from the perspective of a principal at the school level," he said.

Susan Walker with the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education said the new data system has been well-received by local school districts.

"Even people at the district levels have said it's wonderful -- especially those from the smaller districts that didn't have the capability to build really comprehensive local data systems," Walker said. "It is in the hands of the people who need it the most to diagnose where they are, where their students have room for growth and where their teachers may have room for growth. My take is we're getting what we'd been promised because there's still more to come."