Austin Public Schools to roll out Renaissance data warehouse, digital hall pass and bus tracking

Austin Public Schools’ informational services staff told the school board that the district will begin rolling out a set of integrated tools this fall that the department says will centralize student data, streamline attendance workflows and support tiered interventions.

The presentation, given to the board during an August meeting, said the district will adopt Renaissance EduClimber as its primary data warehouse (replacing a legacy system called Viewpoint), continue using Renaissance’s Star and FastBridge assessments, pilot a social-emotional screening for selected groups, and deploy classroom practice tools Freckle (math and ELA) and Alilo (early literacy). Staff also described a new campus workflow that includes an online absence-request form for families, check-in kiosks and a digital hall-pass system for secondary schools and a bus-tracking/notification feature provided in partnership with the district’s transportation contractor.

District staff said the systems are designed to feed assessment, attendance and behavior data into one platform to support MTSS (multi-tiered system of supports) meetings and intervention tracking. The presentation showed screenshots of EduClimber’s “data walls,” incident and intervention-tracking modules, meeting interfaces, and “effectiveness” reports that let educators identify students who slipped below benchmarks or who improved. Staff said the system will permit longitudinal views of incidents, attendance and assessment results in one place.

Informational-services presenter Corey (role: informational-services staff) told the board the absence-request and campus workflow aim to reduce calls and emails to school attendance clerks by funneling requests through the portal, and that several other districts reported large call-volume reductions after adopting similar tools. The presentation said parents will be able to submit multi-day absence requests, upload supporting documents if available (district will not require doctor notes for medical excuses submitted online), and see automatically calculated school days for multi-day requests. The district will maintain phone and email channels during the transition.

For secondary campuses, staff demonstrated check-in kiosks and a phone/ID barcode workflow for students arriving late, and a digital hall-pass that students can launch from their district portal on district-issued laptops. Teachers can issue passes, set time limits, and administrators will have a hall-pass monitor grid that shows who is in the halls and when passes expire. Staff said building administrators can set constraints (for example, limits on concurrent passes or restrictions on particular students) to match site-level expectations.

The presentation also described integration points with the student information system (Infinite Campus), noting nightly data transfers of classes, grades and roster data into EduClimber. The district plans to migrate the last two years of data from SWIS (School-Wide Information System) so incident history is preserved and then to manage incident/minor referrals directly in EduClimber to avoid maintaining a separate SWIS contract.

Staff said the district will pilot a social-emotional screening tool with fourth- and fifth-grade students and selected other populations, and that training began with a train-the-trainer session followed by site-level training through back-to-school. Freckle and Alilo are scheduled to be rolled out after fall benchmarking windows and will be available to K–6 teachers for purposeful practice tailored to students’ assessment results.

District staff emphasized that the systems are intended to reduce staff time spent finding and assembling student data during MTSS and ISD meetings by putting all needed elements in one meeting interface.

Implementation timeline shared in the presentation included: train-the-trainer sessions already held, site training beginning immediately (presentation said “starting tomorrow, 8 a.m.”), bus-tracking account activation emails to parents scheduled the following Wednesday, and Freckle/Alilo rollout after fall benchmarking. Staff described migration of historic data and nightly automated feeds from the SIS.

The board’s discussion included questions about behavior data transfer from SWIS and the expected efficiency gains for teachers and administrators. No formal vote or action to adopt the tools was recorded in the provided transcript excerpt.

Austin Public Schools informational-services staff: Corey, informational-services staff (first referenced at timecode 825.74).