Database Management is the foundation of accurate reporting, reliable data, and smooth district operations. PAEC Student Data Services takes a proactive, systematic approach to maintaining and optimizing your FOCUS database, ensuring critical setups remain accurate, consistent, and aligned with FLDOE requirements. From course catalogs and graduation requirements to student data fields and state assessments, we eliminate long-standing configuration issues, reduce staff workload, and prevent errors before they impact reporting, grades, or funding. By centralizing maintenance at the district level and keeping systems current with evolving state standards, we give districts confidence that their data is clean, organized, and ready when it matters most. We also assist districts with the processing data files from various third-party systems such as transportation, lunch, and library management systems, facilitating seamless data integration and enhancing the overall efficiency of the Student Information System
Course Catalog Clean-up & Maintenance
In the past, many of our schools struggled with managing their grade posting settings. Every semester during grade posting we would see issues with credits, course history terms and GPA calculations. That is until we implemented a systematic process to clean-up the FOCUS course catalog and lock down all of the grading settings at the district level. Now district MIS have complete control over the school grade posting settings, preventing accidental mistakes or omissions.
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This might sound like a daunting task, but we designed an automated process to push these grade posting settings “up” to the course catalog from the school’s master schedule. We start by running a series of custom reports to identify the various naming conventions across the schools for custom grade posting settings like the Grading Scales and Grade Posting Averaging Schemes and make those names and short names as consistent as possible. Second, MIS staff use additional custom reports we built to see where the conflicts are across schools where grade posting settings differ. They then either make the settings uniform across all the schools or set up 8th digit course numbers to allow for necessary variations. Finally we run a series of database queries to mass assign all of the grade posting settings on the catalog based on the schools master schedule, preventing the schools from ever messing up these settings again.
Maintenance of the Course Catalog is easy for SDS districts as well. Every year we add, remove and update the CCD changes to the FOCUS Course Catalog for our districts. MIS staff simply “activate” any new courses they want to use and manually assign the grade posting settings specific to their district.
Grad Requirement Report Clean-up & Maintenance
Guidance Counselors need to have a clear picture of which students are on track for graduation and which are not. In the past, they struggled to get the FOCUS Grad Requirement Report to be 100% accurate, oftentimes there were issues with the setup they simply didn’t understand and couldn’t maintain. Other times we found schools were not assigning the Grad Programs at all or assigning the wrong programs to students. This headache is no longer an issue for PAEC SDS districts.
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We now have a systematic process for setting up the FLDOE standard Grad Programs for each of our districts. We also have a process in place to automatically match the FOCUS Course Catalog Grad Subjects to the FLDOE CCD Grad Subjects to make sure these subjects are always aligned. Finally, we’ve created automations that assign these standard programs to your students as soon as they enroll in high school based on their cohort. If students are assigned to an ACCEL Grad Option, the automation will switch them to appropriate Grad Program as well.
This project has completely removed the tedious pieces of Grad Setup and Maintenance from school and district MIS staff as the PAEC SDS team takes care of this for our participating districts. We also have a series of training articles for Guidance and Data Entry staff to provide them detailed instructions for all the various special scenarios related to Secondary Grading, such as waivers, industry certification substitutions, grade forgiveness, credit recovery, and state assessment requirements. Our schools now feel confident they are entering their data correctly and getting accurate reports on student progress.
Student Field Clean-up & Maintenance
One thing we love the most about FOCUS is that the system is incredibly customizable, allowing districts to create numerous custom fields to store and track data. However, over the years this great feature in combination with constantly changing FLDOE data elements have created a maintenance nightmare for MIS staff. We found administrators and data entry staff struggling to find the information they are looking for.
This is why we took on a major project to completely reorganize all of the data elements in Focus and why PAEC SDS takes on the burden of maintaining all of the FLDOE state required fields for our districts. We systematically work with each of our districts to design each demographic screen with ease of use and organization in mind. Further, we have links to every FLDOE data element embedded next to the field label and we update these links each year to the new handbook. This allows staff to quickly find those handy descriptions from FLDOE so they can get all of the details that impact their survey reporting quickly and easily.
Assessment Setup Clean-up & Maintenance
If you’ve ever worked with assessment data you probably know it can be a bear to deal with. Throughout the year state assessment file layouts are changing, new tests are coming out, and rarely is this communicated well to MIS staff. PAEC SDS manages all of the state assessment setup and test parsers/importers for all of our participating districts. MIS staff simply follow step-by-step instructions for importing their test scores each time they are released. We give MIS the flexibility to upload preliminary scores from FRS or just wait to upload the final ShareFile results. We provide MIS with training each year on how to manage the complexities of the 30% calculation for EOCs. We work closely with the FLDOE Assessment office to make sure our data setup is exactly in line with FLDOE Appendix L, every test and every test part in FOCUS is setup to match exactly how the state wants it. This means anytime you get scores from other districts, even if they use a different test than you do, those scores will still load when you import them through FASTER.
