Client Story
Glenbrook High School District
Long-term Partnership
For many of our clients, our work spans years, even decades. Our team strives to establish a strong partnership on the foundation of robust applications and then continues to drive innovation with new technology as their businesses scale.
We’ve been fortunate to work with the Glenbrook School District in Illinois for years and have built a slew of applications for its administrative team.
Investment Tracking
One of our earliest projects focused on making it easier for a small user group in the main administrative offices to track district investments. Our development team built a FileMaker application that allowed these users to enter new investment data, edit existing investment data, and, most importantly, generate critical reports. They can import new investments directly from a bank-generated CSV/Excel document.
We ensured the little details that had created wrinkles in their previous process — attaching bank records and archiving old investments, for example – were built into the core system. Our developers also built out an intuitive but robust auditing reporting system that showed interest to be earned for the current fiscal year and the next fiscal year for all open investments, fulfilling requirements for an annual audit.
Our developers also built a web portal, allowing a more general administrative office to review and report on current investments. Through the system, they can see new investments, maturity reports, and closed investments.
Event Registration
Our next project focused on streamlined event registrations and ensuring students’ safety at events. For events like Prom, we built a system that matched student IDs to purchased tickets, so that when students arrive they can scan in and out of the event on kiosks and staff are notified if a ticket has already been purchased. This allowed the administration to understand and improve traffic flow as well as monitor when students come and go in case of an emergency.
Facility Sign In
Further focusing on student safety, our team built functionality focused on securing traffic in and out of the school during school hours, including during open lunch and early release. Students at specific grade levels have open lunch privileges – they can come and go from the building within specific blocks during midday. Tracking these students, however, for both safety and security reasons, is difficult.
We developed a solution similar to the event registration application, allowing students to scan in and out at kiosks posted at entrances. The system ensures students are leaving during the correct time block, significantly reducing the amount of time staff needs to spend cross-checking allowed times on and off campus for each student.
Administrative staff can access logs to see how many – and which — students are off campus, a critical component of headcounts during potential emergencies. Schools are responsible for knowing where students are at all times, and this solution made this responsibility much easier to manage for staff.
Administration can also monitor and restrict traffic flow to special areas, like science labs, with this functionality. This even extends to buses, where students can scan on and off buses with their ID cards, to ensure they’re not boarding the incorrect bus.
Student Late Arrivals Tracking
Once we started streamlining student tracking in these areas, the Glenbrook School District administration started to realize all of its potential for other areas. Our next project focused on tracking late arrivals during the school day.
Students who arrived late could scan in, which logs and sends tardy notifications to teachers and parents and allows the administration to run reports on student tardiness.
In some case, students have customized schedules, allowing them to arrive to school late and leave early, depending on the day and semester. Administrative staff can customize schedules by student to streamline this process and run reports for students who attempt to leave campus outside of allowed times.
Student ID Management
We also helped automate another time-intensive responsibility for district staff – the creation of ID cards for students and staff. When a new student is registered, as well as at the beginning of a new school year, students receive new ID cards. We built a system that not only streams the sending of updated data to the printers, but also makes the process much easier for school administration. Our team also created a self service kiosk where staff and students can update their photo, with staff approval, and print a card directly if they have not done so already for that academic year.
We also developed digital ID cards for students to pull up on their phones, cutting down on issues related to lost ID cards.
COVID Questionnaire
The spring and summer of 2020 were a period of uncertainty and adjustment for many school districts. Glenbrook School District wanted to prepare for every scenario. Our team helped them tentatively plan for an in-person return to school by building them a full-customizable COVID questionnaire to administer to the students and faculty on a daily basis.
We developed an application that serves as a customizable questionnaire, asking students and staff a series of COVID-related questions, either online at home or at the school entrance. Once this information was collected, the student’s temperature was recorded. Based on the student’s answers and the school’s COVID policies, the student (or faculty member) would be permitted into the building. The solution provides daily reports of all students and allows administrators to review a student’s questionnaire history should the need arise.
Online Student Enrollment
As more students enter the district, the enrollment process becomes more critical. Our team’s next project focused on making this workflow more efficient. We built a dashboard that allows student guardians to submit information for their students and track the enrollment process. The application includes notification emails for both the guardian and the administration, as well as automated progression through enrollment steps, like proof of identity and age. The solution includes language surveys, attachment submissions, legal residency document tracking, and other critical components, all in one place.
Summer School and Camp Registration
Once we perfected the student enrollment process, it made sense to expand the system into other registrations. Our team moved on to tackling summer school and summer camp registration to further automate laborious processes for the district’s administrative team.
The system simplifies the process of adding course details into the system, modifying school term dates, creating records, and managing waitlists. Our solution allowed students to register for summer classes, matching their ID information and course information. As many summer school classes, like cooking and self-defense courses, are open to community members, we added functionality for non-student registrations as well.
Future Innovation & Transformation
Our partnership with the Glenbrook School District spans years. Most of the solutions our team has built for the district are built on Claris FileMaker and web applications with strategic integrations with other critical business systems. We aim to increase their return on investment in their foundational platforms, simplifying their workflows and further streamlining their district-wide operations. We look forward to continuing to drive innovation through automation with their administrative teams in the years ahead.
About Glenbrook High School District
Located 20 miles north of Chicago in a suburban setting, District 225 offers a public education to approximately 4,700 students in Glenview, Northbrook and portions of unincorporated Northfield Township.