Bolstering Equity and Maximizing Opportunity—How St. Lucie Public Schools Has Embraced the Challenge of Providing a Twenty-First Century Education

Examining the bigger picture of a twenty-first century education requires buy-in from key stakeholders like students, parents, teachers, and administrators. No one knows the importance of that collaboration better than the Chief Operating Officer for St. Lucie Public Schools, Terence O’Leary, who has been involved in education for more than thirty years. From Terence’s perspective, the key to effective communication with key stakeholders is harnessing the power of technology to get granular data without losing the capacity to communicate overall trends. That balancing act requires an ecosystem of powerful tools and St. Lucie Public Schools has partnered with Microsoft to find the right mixture of software, devices, and apps to do just that.

A Weekly Deep Dive—How St. Lucie Public Schools is using Power BI to See and Support Each and Every Student

Every week, Terence and the executive directors that oversee the St. Lucie Public Schools meet to review the data. Those meetings produce key updates that are shared with principals, which in turn, share the important data with teachers, staff, parents, and even students. From Terence’s perspective, Power BI has helped facilitate “a multi-layered approach where we can see where our students are at.  Power BI has given us the vision to look through a single pane of glass to evaluate how we are as a district and where our students are at the highest level of the big picture.”

Power BI has been essential for getting this right. As Terence explains, “Power BI gives us that granular look into where every single student is in their educational path, whether it be in their GPA, their discipline, attendance, or any of those types of data. Power BI is the tool that wraps around all the other tools and allows us to know exactly where our students are at from a skill set level relative to state requirements for graduation. We use Power BI to assess all the students, even at the earliest stage of K1 and two.”

One of the people that benefits from these weekly meetings is Jane Whitaker, who serves as the principal of Mariposa Elementary. Jane explains that “using Power BI to drill down to individual students is a huge piece of the puzzle for us. We look at our attendance, academics, it's all those pieces of the puzzle that really look at the whole gamut of each individual student. Power BI has been an amazing tool for us to utilize across the district. And as a new administrator, it's made a huge difference in reducing my learning curve.”

These insights enable the district to make key choices about resource allocation. As Terence explains, “with Power BI we can determine which subjects need more support as summer offerings. This was especially true when we were dealing with COVID-19. We used Power BI to make sure we had a very robust summer school with a focus on the classes that experienced the most learning loss. We can now provide very strategic opportunities. Power BI allows us to visually see that and provide solutions at the most granular level, even with the 41,000 students that we have within their district, no one gets lost, and no one gets left behind.”

Managing a Massive Device Deployment—How St. Lucie Public Schools Used Microsoft Intune to Ensure Students Have Everything They Need to Succeed

COVID-19 accelerated the St. Lucie Public Schools plan to achieve a one-to-one device deployment. They picked a Dell device to ensure that their students would stay in the Microsoft Ecosystem. Julie Kittrel is the Network Manager for St. Lucie Public Schools. She was on the front lines of the decision-making and deployment. In her estimation, “we needed to basically double the inventory of laptops that we had in our district so that we could provide devices for all of our kids. We used the SCCM system configuration manager, which allowed us to basically configure the devices and then once the device hit our network or any network at all, the student would just login with their credentials and the device would basically provision itself.”

At a time of great uncertainty, parents and students found great comfort in knowing that they were one login away from having access to everything they needed to succeed in the remote learning environment. As Julie notes, “We were able to take those devices and just throw them into the cars as they drove by to pick them up at designated pick-up points and then the parents could take them home, connect to the Wi-Fi if they had it, and then they were off and running.” After the district had possession of the devices, it took just five days to put thousands of devices into the hands of their students who were then one login away from being up and running with remote learning.

As the district moved away from remote learning, the benefits of using Intune have remained. As Julie explains, “our devices are in the Intune environment, and it is just so easy to tweak them. If we need a particular application available to our kids, we can easily just throw it out there and it's available rather than the old model where we would have to send our techs to reimage everything. It's made a big, big, big difference. So that was huge decision that we had to go through, but it was a huge win for our students.”

From Terence’s perspective, there was an added benefit of using Intune—maintaining security. As he summarizes “from a cyber security perspective, we wanted to make sure that we were honoring the Children Internet Protection Act. The cloud-based solution allows us to support cyber security from afar. Even while we are inside and working from our district office, we can push out things like virus definitions to home networks to make sure that students’ data were safe and as part of our mission. We want to make sure that we deliver our students the safest environment to work on their work, whether they're at home or in school. Intune allows us to deploy that in a very efficient manner and provide a service that is easy and just works for the students.”

Student and Teacher Innovations—How St. Lucie Public Schools Has Moved Beyond Simple Remote Delivery to a Twenty-First Century Model of Collaboration

The students at St. Lucie Public Schools are enthusiastic about the pedagogical innovations happening around them. Different schools are innovating in fun ways like doing bus dismissal through Microsoft Teams, integrating Minecraft into the classroom, and using OneNote to provide more extensive feedback on student assignments. And the desire to use these technologies to their potential seems to be infectious.  As Laurie Boyer, Coordinator of Magnet Schools, explains: “We’re receiving feedback from teachers about wanting to do and offer more.  They want to learn more because they’re seeing their peers doing it.   And there are others looking to share.   It has been powerful.  This school year their confidence had been built up.”

In more good news, even the students themselves are participating in and leading innovations. For example, one group of students now uses Microsoft Teams to run the morning announcements for their peers. This is an entirely student run initiative that is supported by the school administration and shows that when empowered, students are just as excited as their teachers to find ways to use education technologies to help re-envision education.

As exciting as these innovations are, Terence rightly notes that the real advantage is the equity of outcomes these technologies enable. From his perspective, “we have to tackle the challenges of technology adoption to provide equity and opportunity for all of our students. We can't afford for our students to miss any opportunities and we want to make sure all of them are in a place to succeed when they graduate.”

Terence points to the numbers as proof in the proverbial pudding: “If you look at our graduation rates, we have gone from 68% in 2013 to over 94.2% last year. And it's not just one and done, it's been consistent over the last four years. We're consistently moving our graduation percentages to a higher level and all of the work shows in the output.”