Shippensburg district previews Linkit data warehouse; board presses on privacy, research and rollout

Administrators and a vendor representative described a yearlong pilot and a proposed rollout of Linkit, a district data‑warehouse platform intended to centralize student assessment, attendance and behavior data to support MTSS and targeted instruction.

"The data warehouse is to help us make data‑informed decisions in our instruction so that we're better able to support all levels of students," said Dr. Donat, who briefed the board on the district’s comprehensive plan and past pilot work. He said centralizing disparate records saves teachers substantial time otherwise spent logging into many systems.

Mike Zwatch, Pennsylvania account director for Linkit, demonstrated dashboards that combine PSSA/Keystone results, benchmark diagnostics, attendance and behavior data to create longitudinal student profiles. "Any data we can bring into the platform as long as we have it tied to a student ID," Zwatch said, "we can layer it to tell a longitudinal story and auto‑tier for early warning." He also described permission controls, anonymization features and third‑party audits, and said the company does not sell data.

Board members questioned the link between teacher access to centralized data and improved student outcomes. "Do we have any research that tells us whether having access to this information improves outcomes?" asked a board member. Zwatch said scholarly research exists on targeted interventions and effect sizes when instruction is informed by diagnostics, and noted the platform can anonymize names or weight teacher input to reduce bias.

The administration confirmed parts of the district are already loaded into the pilot: K–5 buildings include PSSA, Firefly and iReady/diagnostic sets; middle and high schools have prior years’ PSSA, Firefly and Keystone data. Current year state results were not yet available. The district is working to integrate Skyward attendance and to define permissioned roles so teachers see only rosters in their classes.

On privacy, Linkit representatives said the system uses role‑based permissions so district administrators see all records, building administrators see their students and teachers see only their assigned students. IEP documents are pulled as PDFs through secure tokens from IEP Writer; the vendor said those PDFs are not editable in Linkit. "Everything in our system is permission‑based," Zwatch said.

Administration and Linkit proposed a phased rollout with initial training for administrators and MTSS teams, followed by teacher training during early‑year professional development, aiming to have usable past‑year reports available by September. The board discussed limited early access for a small group of teachers under guided training but emphasized avoiding broad, untrained access that can cause frustration.

There was no action to approve a contract at the meeting; the data‑warehouse item remained on the discussion agenda for follow‑up and a future action item.