Judy Wall

2009 Welcome Back

Welcome back to a new year that hopefully brings more positive news in terms of student growth and balanced budgets to each of you. The 2008-09 year was especially challenging as six of the 13 PSESD members and 18 of the 30 NWESD districts experienced declining enrollments.  However, overall a record high FTE count was reached with slightly less than one half percent growth resulting in a total of 170,006 FTE in our region.   

The standard for districts of doing more with less has taken on greater meaning in this economy. To support you with your challenges, the NWRDC staff is making every effort to ensure your staff is knowledgeable and making full use of the integrated WESPaC Management Systems. The more district staffs use all applications, efficiencies will improve, costs decrease and more dollars can remain in the classroom.

WSIPC is offering three new and free products that are being rolled out including WEDSS (WA Education Decision Support System) a module of the Student Suite, and Fast Track and True Time, modules in the School Business Suite. 

• WEDSS* is a Data Warehouse that offers the ability to collect data from multiple sources in a common format, over time and then use the available tools to create reports and dashboards resulting in better reporting and better decisions.
• Fast Track is an automated hiring system. It assists districts in identifying the best candidate, completing the hiring process online and providing automatic email responses to applicants once they apply.
• True Time is a fully-integrated time tracking system that is FLSA compliant and can be accessed, anytime, anywhere, and online.

* Northwest ESD is making available to principals additional training focused on their reporting needs as part of NWESD’s Continuous Improvement Training program. All member districts are eligible to participate in this project.

ATHLETIC DIRECTORS and COACHES

This fall special sessions will be offered to introduce Athletic Directors and Coaches to the Student Activities application. Staff can easily track student activities and awards. It is integrated with other modules such as Educator Access+, Discipline, Grading, and more. Student Activities affords mass adding of activities by course and links to students’ schedules and can clone student information from one year to the next.  Using Family Access, parents can track practices, games and other events associated with their child’s activities.

FEE FOR SERVICE PRINT SHOP

A growing number of schools and districts are taking advantage of the Fee for Service Print Shop and the corresponding savings provides an opportunity for savings to remain in the classroom.  In 2008-2009 the Print Shop completed 250 individual jobs, representing 28 school districts. Top jobs for this year included: programs, books, NCR forms, postcards, newsletters, business cards, flyers.  The laser printing is available in color or black and white format.

STUDENT

Bringing training to the client and maintaining a five person phone rotation will continue as a major focus this year.

NWRDC Student Team provided:

• 144 Training Classes, 73 at regional locations                 
• 52 District Consultations
• 50 In-District trainings                                                      
• 36 one-on-one Client Consultations/Trainings
• 136 Phone Consultations scheduled for 1.5 to three hours

FISCAL

Customer Service is key to the success of the Fiscal/HR team as they balance efforts supporting districts on the legacy system and simultaneously converting, training and supporting WESPaC districts.  This fall, NWRDC staff will learn True Time and Fast Track and roll out a plan for interested districts to learn and be supported in using either or both applications.

OPERATIONS

Operations staff print reports, monitor and support school districts’ data, and provide for data back up and security at an offsite storage center according to State guidelines. WESPaC and Legacy printing increased this last year with 6,800,000 sheets printed, 102,000 WESPaC warrants printed and 266,000 Legacy warrants printed.

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 we will continue with additional upgrades and replacing older hardware in 2009-2010.

PLEASE TAKE SPECIAL NOTE

All WESPaC modules are available to member school districts and included in the fee. There are no additional costs when a district chooses to use a new WESPaC module or for training and support. When using or considering use of a third party software, the district is encouraged to contact an NWRDC representative to ensure that the same data is not already available within WESPaC.

If you have any questions, please contact me at jwall@nwrdc.net or 425-349-6556.

Judy Wall, Director