Danville High School Principal Jacob Bretz asked the Danville School District 118 Board of Education to approve a three-year purchase of Panorama Pathways, an add-on to the high school’s existing Panorama Education contract, to provide nightly graduation-tracking and automated transcript auditing. The board approved the purchase 6-0.

Bretz told the board the service would “sync nightly and using students' current grades each night and our graduation requirements, will give us a daily update on where every child in the school is related to graduation and whether they're on track or not.” He said the total three-year cost is $34,100 and “includes a one-time $10,000 integration fee” to connect Panorama to the district student information system, Skyward.

Nut graf: The tool is intended to free counselors from time-consuming manual transcript reviews and give administrators daily visibility into each student's progress toward graduation. Bretz said the funds would come from Danville High School’s Illinois Empower funds, money restricted to the high school's school-improvement activities and budgeted for purchase services in the current fiscal year.

During discussion, a board member asked how the district would measure the new service’s effectiveness and whether staff were actually using it. Bretz said he meets biweekly with the school counselor and would make platform use a standing item in those meetings; he added the district had already seen gains using Panorama’s existing student-success tools, including an increase in graduation rate and freshman-on-track metrics.

Bretz described the expected implementation mechanics: nightly automatic file transfers from the district’s IT systems to Panorama and daily updates in the morning. He also said the $10,000 integration is a one-time fee; if the district continued the service after three years the ongoing cost would be $6 per student per year.

The board moved and approved the purchase. The motion carried 6-0.

Ending: Bretz told the board that other elementary and middle schools had expressed interest in the Panorama Pathways tool and that the district might pilot additional campuses at low or no cost in the future.