Escuela Popular, a charter school in San Jose, CA, mainly serves Latino immigrants, many with limited English language skills.  The school serves a critical need by offering an intensive language acquisition program and a high school graduation opportunity for these students.  The educational background of the students range from those who have only attended elementary school to students who have some college in another country.  

The school uses PowerSchool® as its Student Information System.

The school’s process of scheduling classes is fairly complex,  and is complicated by the fact that classes vary in duration.  Some English classes span multiple periods.  Additionally, there are year-long, semester-long and quarter-long classes.  Since many of the students enter the school with foreign transcripts, determining their progress towards California high school graduation requirements is particularly challenging.

To simplify the scheduling process, the school moved groups of students together as a cohort, independent of actual academic performance.  While this approach simplified scheduling, it made the process of ensuring students were able to graduate on time, more complex.  For graduation progress, the registrar was forced to focus primarily on students in most need, i.e., graduating seniors.  

Even though the school used PowerSchool®, scheduling of classes, determining credits needed, monitoring attendance and other administrative analysis requirements involved tedious, one-student-at-a-time data analysis.   

eUREKA! Reporting allowed the school to serve the individual needs of their students better by providing the means to manage all their students, and group them into meaningful subsets, using an automated, consistent and error-free process.  This benefited the registrar, who could now manage all students, instead of only graduating seniors.  The principal was also able to create a better master schedule, with balanced class sizes, that was suited to individual student needs.  Best of all, students and staff had more timely and accurate information to ensure all students were able to graduate on time!

With eUREKA! Reporting. Discovery Solutions was able to develop a reporting system for the school that allowed them to:

Assign students to the appropriate grade levels.  A complex grade level assignment algorithm was applied, based on graduation requirements met.  Only those who were able to meet the requirements for graduation in a year’s time were classified as seniors.

Balance course enrollment.  eUREKA! Reporting  projected the number of students expected for each offered course based on past grades and unfulfilled graduation requirements, resulting in a significant improvement in course enrollment balancing.

Provide accurate credit summaries  Provide one-click graduation credit summaries for all students.  These single page summaries were sorted by teacher and section to enable teachers to distribute the reports to the students in each section, saving the school both time and postage.  These reports also eliminated the need for the registrar to compile them manually, and allowed students to take a more proactive role towards credit completion.

Facilitate planning and scheduling for summer school.  eUREKA! Reporting helped the school identify classes that should be offered over the summer break, and which students would benefit from enrolling.  The focus was on recommending summer school courses to students who had not completed the full credit requirement for a given core class, either because they enrolled late or because they failed a semester -- information that was not available before eUREKA! Reporting was implemented.

To speak with our customers about their experiences with eUREKA! Reporting, contact us.