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St. Lucie schools expand Power BI dashboards to track attendance, growth and operations
Summary
District leaders showed a suite of Power BI dashboards that allow principals and central staff to view attendance, graduation-on-track, progress monitoring, growth and operational work orders in near real time.
Chief of Schools Dr. Sommer and district technology and operations staff described how Microsoft Power BI dashboards are being used across the district to make data more actionable for principals and central-office teams.
Dr. Sommer said the district's custom dashboards let principals drill from school-level metrics down to individual students and teachers. Examples shown to the board included an attendance dashboard that isolates students with 15'plus absences; a graduation dashboard that lists students who still need a reading test to qualify for a diploma; the "opportunity" dashboard for progress-monitoring results; growth comparisons that show which schools or teachers are accelerating students faster than the district average; and student-scheduling and grade analytic tools.
Dr. Sommer said the district uses roughly 100 dashboards and that the dashboards update nightly. "If I want to see the students that have missed between 15 and 19 days, I hit the next button," she said, describing how a school leader can export a table of names for outreach. She and Superintendent Prince noted the system creates a common set of visuals and drill-downs so principals can compare schools and share practices: "This is creating a lot of conversations between principals. Like what exactly is happening in these classrooms?" Prince said.
Chief of Operations Terrence O'Leary described operational dashboards built from vendor platforms (for example, SchoolDude work-order data). He said the facilities dashboard imports and aggregates tickets so the department can see counts and technician assignments across schools; year-to-date work-order volume shown in the presentation was 15,669 tickets. O'Leary said dashboards support quicker operational decisions, for example reallocating technicians when certain schools show increased open-ticket volume.
Board members asked about training and security. Staff said dashboards are provided to principals, assistant principals, district staff and selected leaders; teachers do not have general access. The presenters described an iterative build process driven by principals' needs, with district programmers customizing visuals and access. Dr. Sommer said the goal is intuitive, low-training tools that save principals time and shift effort back to instruction.
