One of the largest school districts in the nation ― with hundreds of thousands of students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade at over 1,000 schools and over 200 public charter schools ― was struggling to keep parents and guardians informed about their students’ grades, lunch balances, activities, and general district and school news.

Problem

The District’s boundaries extend across more than 700 square miles and include a major U.S. city as well as some smaller municipalities in and around the region. Making this challenge even more difficult is the fact that over 100,000 households in the district do not have internet access, which means they rely on their mobile phones to access student information. With student information contained within numerous, non-connected systems, and with some of those systems not available on mobile devices, the district needed to provide an all-in-one application to serve up all student information through a mobile interface. 

Leveraging the Oracle Autonomous Mobile Cloud

Fishbowl Solutions worked with the school district to develop a hybrid mobile application using Apache Cordova and mobile web site front-end by leveraging Oracle Autonomous Mobile Cloud Service development, and a centralized content management system provided by Oracle WebCenter Content. The application will essentially integrate all student-related information systems into a single, multi-lingual, mobile enabled access point for every parent or guardian in the District to view the information they need.

Outcome

Through the development and implementation of the mobile app and mobile website through Oracle Autonomous Mobile Cloud Service development, Fishbowl Solutions was able to improve the search and findability for parent resources and programs for the school district. With an improved, multi-lingual parent-user experience for information access, this development has drastically reduced the number of parent office visits, phone calls, and emails, and helped cut costs by eliminating much of the paper flow from the school. Perhaps most importantly, improving access to the information for parents and guardians has led to an increase in parent and guardian participation in their student’s academic life. The school district not only now provides increased transparency and parent-awareness of student attendance, grades, and assignments, but has also seen an increase in parent participation in school activities and after school programs.