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Los Angeles launches consolidated student data system

Administrators at the second-largest school district in the country say they want to save educators the time of sorting through antiquated databases.
Los Angeles
(Getty Images)

To increase accessibility to student information, the superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District announced Tuesday a new system designed to consolidate student data into one easy-to-use database.

As the second-largest school district in the nation, LAUSD serves more than 600,000 K-12 students. And with such a large student population, finding data on individual students can mean teachers and administrators have to sort through large amounts of data spread across disparate databases to find what they are looking for.

“In order to better serve the individual needs of students, Los Angeles Unified is launching the Whole Child Integrated Data Platform,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said in a statement.

The new integrated student information platform will pull together data housed across 80 different databases into one central platform to lighten the workload of educators.

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“Teachers, principals, and counselors currently spend too much time searching for information about each student, taking away valuable time that can be better spent addressing the needs of students,” Beutner said. “The new platform will make it easier for educators to access the information they need in a timely fashion.”

The platform will be piloted at three schools before being rolled out across all of the district’s 1,147 schools, he said.

LAUSD has worked to improve student data management since 2003 when it launched its first integrated student information system, which was designed to include all modules for student data management, including attendance, enrollment, grades, counseling and discipline. The district has continually developed this system over the years and is expected to continually adapt it to the changing needs of the school district.

Betsy Foresman

Written by Betsy Foresman

Betsy Foresman was an education reporter for EdScoop from 2018 through early 2021, where she wrote about the virtues and challenges of innovative technology solutions used in higher education and K-12 spaces. Foresman also covered local government IT for StateScoop, on occasion. Foresman graduated from Texas Christian University in 2018 — go Frogs! — with a BA in journalism and psychology. During her senior year, she worked as an intern at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and moved back to the capital after completing her degree because, like Shrek, she feels most at home in the swamp. Foresman previously worked at Scoop News Group as an editorial fellow.

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