Aligning Schoolzilla to Your District Strategy

Using multiple metrics to track student progress allows for a more complete and holistic view of performance, and multi-measure dashboards are a great way to present data. But the use of these dashboards presents additional questions, such as:

• How do the measures relate to one another?
• How many measures should be included in each strategic area?
• How should dashboards be aligned with organizational strategy and objectives?

The Schoolzilla dashboards organize metrics into strategic pillars on the District Profile, School Profile, Student Profile, Our Schools and Our Students pages. Strategic pillars have names (e.g. “CHRONIC ABSENTEEISM, SUSPENSIONS & FAILING GRADES”) and descriptions (e.g. "Leading indicators of student engagement, school climate and graduation").

One or more metrics can be added to each strategic pillar in an order you specify. During implementation, we set up your dashboards with our default layout, but we can customize your dashboards based on your preferences.

Here are some ideas for organizing your dashboards to align with your district’s priorities:

• Organize metrics to align with your strategic plan or essential questions, using language that is familiar to staff in your buildings.
  
• Assess which metrics people should see first at the top of the screen. What metrics are most important for people to monitor frequently?
  
• Consider clustering high-frequency, early-identification metrics such as Chronic Absence, Suspensions and Course Failures into one pillar to make it easier for staff to filter metrics results on Our Students.
  
• Structure pillars and metric layout to facilitate grade level or academic area professional learning communities.
  
• Focus on student subgroups or particular grade levels, or on particular subject areas for assessments or course failures. We can create metric copies for each subgroup or subject area. Please see here for more details and reach out to your implementation specialist or support with your request!
  
• Think about separating academic strategic pillars by subject area. For example, make it easier to compare ELA results on Normed Benchmark proficiency, Normed Benchmark growth and State Test performance together.
  
• Order your leading indicators first within a strategic pillar and lagging indicators -- such as annual state test results -- last. Or, group all of your normed assessments together in one pillar and put state tests in a pillar below.
• Set district and school goals for your metrics so that stakeholders can see at a glance how schools are progressing towards goals.
  

We can also support additional data in Schoolzilla. For example:

• Include survey data. We can support additional metric data via the custom metric uploader. Please see here for more details.
• Include assessment data not supported by one of our connectors or student on/off track status outside of your SIS. We can support student level data of many forms in our assessment template. Please see here for more information.

Please reach out to your implementation specialist or support with additional questions!