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IT team credits in‑house work for wrapback expansion and system efficiencies
Summary
SBOE IT staff described FY2025 accomplishments — wrapback expansion to non‑credentialed staff and drivers, migration off legacy servers and data governance steps — and said building and supporting systems internally produced cost and operational benefits.
Sean Howard, the agency’s IT lead, told the board that his seven‑person IT team completed a set of projects in FY2025 aimed at reducing costs and improving workflow: expanding Ratback/wrapback enrollment to include non‑credentialed staff and drivers, automating evaluation processes, converting bulk‑scanned workflows and migrating application servers off legacy infrastructure.
"With this wrap back expansion, that was a huge major muscle move, bringing in an extra 100 and some thousand folks into that who otherwise weren't in the system at all," Superintendent Kraft told the board while praising Sean’s group for building the capability in‑house. Kraft added that the legislature set aside $600,000 for a contract to make that happen but the agency’s team executed the work without taking the contract funds; that decision entailed overtime and internal cost trade‑offs.
Why it matters: the wrapback expansion brings many more adults who interact with students into the state monitoring system; IT leaders argued that owning the code and hosting the service improves long‑term maintainability and reduces dependency on outside vendors.
Data and customer service: Howard also described data‑management work (147 data requests fulfilled and 45 report deployments in FY2025), automated ETL workflows from vendors (Pearson, Praxis) and the addition of messaging and an educator dashboard to reduce front‑line customer support calls.
Next steps: IT will focus on Lean Ohio phase 2 (case management), continued data governance planning and separating systems from the Department of Education and Workforce as part of an ongoing migration and cost‑containment effort.
