Northwest Regional Data Center
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Fall Welcome As the 2008 - 2009 year begins, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome back returning superintendents and those superintendents new to the Northwest Regional Data Center (NWRDC). The NWRDC serves 43 school districts and one private school with more than 165,000 student FTEs as well as the Northwest ESD, Puget Sound ESD and the WSIPC Business Office. As the largest of the seven Regional Data Centers statewide, NWRDC provides a comprehensive training program and support of district staff using the WESPaC Student software; the staff in 14 districts using WESPaC Financial; and the remaining 29 Legacy districts that will convert in the years ahead. STUDENT The Office of State Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) CEDARS project is a major discussion item. Statewide 36 school districts, 15 within NWRDC, have submitted the Data Sharing agreement allowing OSPI to pull data with a compliance date of September 2008. OSPI will use the data to:
The Student team is pleased to offer 11 sections of a newly developed “Year Start” hands-on working session to better prepare clients for a successful school beginning. FISCAL The fiscal team is hard at work converting districts to WESPaC Finance. Providing quality conversions and maintaining good customer support remain the primary goals of the team. The team is identifying ways to improve post conversion support including:
In addition to this, they have not forgotten our Legacy clients who will be using WISE for the next three years. To ensure the best service possible, they are holding workshops and providing onsite support. PRINT SHOP Providing a fee for service print shop has proven a success for the data center. Given two years by the Executive Committee to break even, the NWRDC Print Shop met and exceeded the goal within the first year. Staff is contacting districts to arrange brief presentations to principals’ groups, an approach that has proven successful. OPERATIONS Staff continue to print reports, monitor and support school districts’ data, and provide for data back up and security at an off site storage center according to State guidelines. In terms of printing, eight million sheets of paper and forms went through the NWRDC printers. In addition a new warrant printer was purchased to handle the 7,000 WESPaC warrants and 22,000 Legacy warrants printed monthly. INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS In January 2008 NWRDC started an aggressive infrastructure upgrade and replacement program. With the Database growth of the last year, we have added hardware to stay ahead of this development. In addition to this we will be continuing with additional upgrades, and replacing older hardware in 2008-2009. · Three Web servers were added followed by a fourth in May bringing the total to nine. · Other upgrades include the replacement of the oldest AIX Data Base server and adding a forth AIX server · For better response times, we added three Fiber Disk arrays bringing Terabytes of storage and increase speed. · Two MetaFrame servers were added for Citrix plus three supporting servers were added. · Bringing the total of new servers added since January to eleven, further enhancing our infrastructure WSIPC WSIPC signed two amendments to the base contract with Skyward, Inc., one addressing student and the other fiscal. The contract now focuses on a two year process with the results focused on improved services and delivery, a greater focus on trainings and development of data warehousing software and custom reporting. Seven staff members are being assigned to focus their work effort on web enabling the Finance system prior to Skyward assuming responsibility for WESPaC Finance in the next 18 to 24 months. As part of the amended agreement, Skyward, Inc. assumes responsibility for the development of WA state reports. What this means to school districts is that any state or federal report that is required by 50 percent of school districts will be developed by Skyward. As Skyward assumes the 50 percent rule, the expectation is that districts will have more reports available to them. Current organizational changes will allow WSIPC staff to work as part of a functional organization rather than be assigned to specific departments. Thus far these changes have resulted in a reduction to the WSIPC FTE by four. Other summer discussions include:
REMINDER All WESPaC modules are available to member school districts as part of your fee. There are no additional costs when a district chooses to use a new module. One good example is making use of the Food Service package which districts are finding saves them a substantial amount of money rather than using another third party product. The student team is ready to assist you with a review of all modules to ensure districts are getting the full value of their software investment. If you have any questions, please contact me at jwall@nwrdc.net or 425-349-6556. Judy Wall, Director |
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