Every student deserves an education that meets their individual needs. This guiding principle drives families to seek unique educational opportunities and educators to design flexible programs that support diverse learners. But how can your Student Information System (SIS) help make this a reality?
Charter and non-traditional schools personalize education through specialized curricula, customized reporting, and flexible learning models. However, this commitment to meeting unique needs requires a wide array of education technology products (edtech) and can be administratively cumbersome. An SIS that works seamlessly with other imperative educational platforms makes it much easier to adapt, scale, and deliver a truly tailored and individualized educational experience without unduly burdening administrators and teachers.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at why integration matters, four key areas where edtech integrations make a big impact, and how the right connections help schools run more efficiently.
The Importance of Student Information System (SIS) Integration
A Student Information System (SIS) is the hub for capturing, accessing, and sharing student information between administrators, educators, families, and regulators. When it works well, it blends into your daily routine, helping everyone stay connected without extra hassle.
Here’s why a well-integrated SIS is important:
- A Single Place for Data & Access: An integrated SIS centralizes and serves as the single source of truth for student records, coursework, communication, and more essential tools, making them easy for educators, students, and families to access.
- Personalized Learning: An integrated SIS provides a complete view of student progress to tailor instruction and interventions based on each student’s unique needs.
- Compliance & Reporting: An integrated SIS tracks student progress, enhancing academic reporting while improving data accuracy for attendance, learning, and outcomes. It also simplifies audits, funding reports, and state compliance.
- Time and Cost Efficiency: An integrated SIS reduces data entry in adjacent edtech products, automating syncing to reduce redundant manual work. Depending on the scope of the SIS Suite, it may also reduce expenses for edtech software subscriptions and maintenance.
Unifying edtech products can be particularly challenging for charter and non-traditional schools. With needs like flexible reporting, virtual and independent study programs, and individualized learning plans, schools with unique learning programs require various systems that fit their model, making seamless integration a complex, but important aspiration.
High-Priority SIS Integrations
Learning Management Systems (LMS)
A Learning Management System (LMS) is an online hub for instruction. Students access materials, submit work and engage with educators and classmates. Educators typically use both an LMS and SIS, and syncing coursework and grades, tracking progress, and ensuring access to learning materials can quickly become overwhelming if these systems are not connected.
Without real-time syncing, manually collecting data is time-consuming and information may differ in the two systems, making it harder to get a clear, up-to-date view of student progress.
On the other hand, direct connections between your SIS and LMS platforms like Canvas, Google Classroom, and EdGenuity allow you to automatically sync student rosters, coursework (assignments and grades), and engagement data. This integration allows families and teachers to find accurate, up-to-date information on either platform. Furthermore, integrated SIS and LMS platforms eliminate manual errors that occur with duplicated data entry, streamlining grading and reporting.
Communication and Collaboration
Keeping everyone in the loop and on the same page—students, teachers, and families—can be one of the biggest challenges in any school, especially when juggling multiple communication channels. Without a clear communication strategy and integrated technology to support it, channels, missed messages, incompatible devices, and splintered communication can create confusion and disengagement.
Connecting tools like Zoom and ParentSquare with SISs unifies collaboration for all stakeholders with timely, synchronized messaging. This ensures that important updates like progress reports, and teacher feedback reach the right people at the right time. For families, this means better engagement, timely alerts, and a stronger connection to their child’s learning. The National Charter School Resource Center sees these kinds of collaborations between schools and parents as a particular strength of non-traditional and charter schools:
“Instead of being constrained by existing systems and misconceptions about the communities they serve, charter schools can use their autonomy and orientation toward innovation to center and uplift the assets and needs of their families.”
When communication is effortless, collaboration thrives, and schools build a more connected, informed, and engaged community—one that supports student success at every level.
Assessment and Analytics
Integrating assessment and analytics tools into an SIS provides opportunities for data views that provide meaningful insights into student performance. Rather than gathering assessments from multiple sources, integration with tools like NWEA, i-Ready, and Renaissance allows schools to understand their students’ collective progress while giving individual students a clear picture of their educational journey.
This visibility allows educators to pinpoint trends, identify learning gaps, and personalize learning when it matters most. Immediate access to assessment data means interventions can be timely and targeted, ensuring students get the support they need without delay. Additionally, these assessments support data-driven decision-making for more adaptive learning paths, ensuring that students in self-paced or flexible learning environments stay engaged at the right level.
Data Integration
When your SIS lacks single sign-on and secure, seamless connections to your other edtech tools, it can lead to inconsistent data and disruptions in access to mission-critical information. Over time, this not only impacts daily operations but also diminishes the value of your school’s technology.
A fully integrated edtech ecosystem simplifies access, creates more accessible data, and builds more user-friendly workflows that span multiple systems. With better data connections, parents can be reassured that their child’s information is safe, while staff benefits from simplified workflows and fewer technical roadblocks. In fact, edtech magazine stresses the importance of proactive technological measures to combat potential vulnerabilities:
“We know that parents may be concerned about how small schools handle their family’s personal and financial data. Because of that fear, some might be resistant to any form of digital transformation because student information might go off campus. However, small schools must allow digital transformation while also ensuring the protection of private information.”
Integrating with platforms like Clever and ClassLink ensures smooth and secure single sign-on (SSO) access to learning tools. Meanwhile, solutions like Securly enhance student safety by providing real-time monitoring and content filtering. When these systems work together within a unified SIS, educators, and families can rest easy, focusing more on academic growth and less on data risks.
Expanding SIS Capabilities with Other Integrations
From SSO to instruction and assessment, it’s important to consider how your SIS works seamlessly with other tools you rely on. Together, these integrations should enhance or transform your administration, instruction, and program management.
When you are evaluating edtech solutions, think about the compatibility, ease of implementation, and potential for creating a more cohesive, interconnected environment for administrators, students, and educators. Ask yourself the following questions to assess effectiveness:
- Do the products help determine if students are able to master their learning objectives?
- Does the technology give students additional learning opportunities?
- How much time, money, and frustration do you save?
What Charter and Non-Traditional Schools Gain from Seamless SIS Integrations
School Pathways offers more than 100+ integrations compatible with a flexible and robust student information system to make school operations smoother and more efficient.
As Melissa Culver from Western Sierra Charter Schools explains:
“The broad, diverse nature of your program allows seamless integration of data that is essential for our school to function properly. Our data is seamlessly shared with ParentSquare, Clever, NWEA, Follett Destiny, Raptor, and Securly. Thank you for providing us with a pivotal product that provides us with the tools we need to serve our students and families with excellence.”
With School Pathways, our integrations help you track and monitor critical indicators of student success. Whether you have in-person, hybrid, or distance-learning models of educational delivery, you’ll have a clear view of student progress across multiple learning touchpoints in one centralized location. At the same time, you’ll help your school operate and deliver high-quality learning experiences with confidence.
Additionally, our accessible family portal ensures that the benefits of a smoothly integrated SIS extend beyond the staff and administrators. Families will be able to stay up-to-date and communicate with teachers and staff easily. With student data securely backed with encryption, user authentication, and detailed audit trails, our system helps keep student and parent data safe while ensuring compliance and peace of mind.
Unify Your Tools with a Well-Integrated SIS
Running a successful school in the current educational landscape means embracing technology in various ways. For charter and non-traditional schools, the right applications can make all the difference in meeting students’ unique needs.
From delivering content to tracking student performance data and communicating with families, schools rely on a variety of tools every day. But when those tools don’t work together, it can lead to inefficiencies, security risks, and extra headaches for your team. When systems are seamlessly integrated, everything runs smoother—ensuring safe, efficient outcomes between educators, families, and administrators.
An integrated SIS like School Pathways’ solution makes those combinations seamless, secure, and more effective. Are you ready to see how School Pathways can integrate with your existing tools? Reach out to schedule a demonstration today.
