Supplemental Applications for the Student Information System
Jim Hutcheson
Troy University - Ft. Benning

Many school districts offer an official administrative package that maintains the student information system. This package efficiently handles the corporate data of attendance, grades, etc. School life often seems to point to "feeding" that package and retreiving needed and necessary reports from such a system. I have found that my work often calls for some additional help from a computer which is supplementary to this package. The following was told to me by a local school administrator following a tense situation with students.

Prior to my selection to a school administrative position, I had had some positive experiences with several Microsoft Office applications which I now find most useful in my new position. My comfort with word processing via the Word application and spreadsheets via Excel has saved me hours in this job. A few stories will suffice to explain.

Recently we received word from the district central office to mail rather than send home a notice. I received the directive around 10:30 AM. The mail was picked up at 11:15 AM.  I have less than one hour to get mailing labels on 725 notices! The student information system doesn't produce mailing labels for us!  Fortunately, I had worked with the system-level technology people to download the needed information into Excel. I completed the labels using Excel and a mail merge into Word in less than 15 minutes. Applying the labels took slightly longer. I am sure that some district techie person could do the same thing with the student information system, but I didn't know how. I needed to complete the project before I could get help from outside resources.

Last year we sent two buses on a field trip out of town. We got a call that one of the buses had a mechanical problem and would be late arriving. We had to notify the parents that the students were OK, just delayed. Unfortunately, the students didn't go on the trip from only one group that was easily identified from our student information system. Since I had already dumped the fields from the information system into Excel, I was quickly able to apply several "filters" to the student data and produce an accurate list of students on both buses complete with phone numbers to call the affected parents. We printed several copies and fanned out to the available phones to begin making contacts. As in the prevous example, we needed to retreive data quickly and in a manner not planned in our student information system.

I am a big proponent of using the student information system, but there are times when a supplemental application is handy to have around. Don't abandon your technological skills with applications when you have access to a large system like most student information systems.


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