Bentonville Public Schools

Bentonville Public Schools’ 1,860 faculty and staff members educate 14,700 students at 17 various campuses — including ten elementary schools, four middle schools, three junior high schools and one high school. U.S. News and World Report ranked Bentonville High School as the second-best Arkansas high school based on student performance and it’s College Readiness Index in 2013. 

In 2012, when Bentonville began searching for a data-warehousing system, Dr. Karen Morton, director of assessment and data management, said the district needed a solution to provide comprehensive data in a user friendly format for staff that would also limit the amount of resources and time on the district’s part to manage the system.

“We needed a one stop shop that allows teachers to be able to go one place to get a complete picture of exactly where their students are,” she said. “Overcoming a major hurdle of making it easy for teachers to access the data will allow them to effectively use the data going forward.”

Morton said the district was essentially looking for a way to effectively use data to create strategies to help students targeted for interventions.

During the spring of 2013, AllofE imported into Matrix the district’s student information data from eSchool+ along with various assessment data going back to 2009-2010, including state data, ACT/PLAN/EXPLORE, NWEA MAP, STAR and ITBS data. One of Matrix’s biggest goals is to take technical work off of the district’s plate.

The system gives teacher and administrative users access to the specific data they need. And instead of having to deal with raw data, Bentonville’s administrators and learning coaches can focus on how to improve student performance through Matrix and spend their time strategizing with teachers on how to continue to provide the most excellent education to the students.

After a successful rollout of Matrix to administrators, principals and teachers, the district has expanded both the amount of data in the system and added new custom functionality that includes:

+ Assessments that measure college readiness, English-language learning and early childhood skills are now in Matrix.

+ A custom gradebook that allows elementary teachers to directly enter reading-level data for students and get instant analysis.

+ Tracking how students performed at a standard level on the Augmented Benchmark and End-of-Course state assessments.

+ Custom benchmarks the district created for certain assessments, allowing administrators and teachers to see how students stack up in various measures.