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Cleveland schools to adopt Enrollment Express and expand PowerSchool tools; director outlines digital testing plans
Summary
Director Michael Kars told the board the district will move to Enrollment Express under the state PowerSchool contract, expand a My Power Hub portal, pilot digital assessments district-wide next year (with the writing portion remaining paper), and highlighted staffing changes and recent technology projects.
Michael Kars, the district's student information director, told the board the student information systems team is focused on three areas: maintaining accurate local student data and reporting to the state; administering assessments; and data analytics to support instruction.
He said the district administers a large volume of assessments (he cited roughly 15,000 TCAP/EOC assessments and about 1,000 ACT administrations annually) and noted the department's recent work to improve data accuracy and error rates with state reporting. Kars said a longtime database coordinator, Kathy Blackner, will retire at the end of June, triggering a departmental restructuring to cover critical data-flow responsibilities.
On technology and enrollment, Kars said the district will adopt Enrollment Express through the state PowerSchool contract, which "does not require an incoming parent to create a totally separate account" and streamlines enrollment data into the district system. He described an upcoming My Power Hub rollout to consolidate teacher, student and parent portals, and said the district has created a "PowerSchool Ninja" chat agent (built with NotebookLM and Google Gemini) to answer common questions.
On testing, Kars said the district aims to administer assessments digitally next year; except for the writing portion of ELA, the state and district plan to move toward fully digital testing. "We are going to assess all students digitally so we will not the only paper testing we will do next year will be the writing portion of the ELA," he said.
Why it matters: The changes are intended to reduce paperwork for families, improve data accuracy for state reporting and streamline testing logistics. The retirement of a senior technician was presented as a near-term staffing challenge that the department must address to sustain recent gains.
Next steps: Kars invited questions and said the district will continue small pilots before full rollouts; board members thanked him and asked that the department coordinate on scheduling and implementation details.
