SIF Application A Success For Virginia Districts

Century Consultants Star_Base School Suite™ Implements SIF Application at
Mecklenburg County School Division, Boydton VA

Lakewood, N.J. (January 15, 2008) – Mecklenburg County Schools was the first school division in Virginia to test the SIF vertical agent for Century and the Virginia Department of Education. Ernie Connor, Director of Technology for the school division says “one of the greatest administrative challenges facing the Mecklenburg County School Division was the need to integrate departmental and division software applications, databases and networks in order to simplify data exchanges between various software and database packages.” The goal was to eliminate redundant data entry, and improve data quality. Accurate student counts would result in essential increases in federal and state funding. The timely availability of centralized district records in real-time provides for critical data driven decisions that have a positive impact on all functions of the district. MCPS utilizes Star_Base School Suite developed by Century Consultants as their student information system. The project undertaken by the division was to provide data from Star_Base School Suite to department databases within the school system.

The MCPS Technology Department worked closely with Century Consultants and Edustructures LLC, Salt Lake City, Utah to synchronize the databases in the division. Century Consultants has been instrumental in assisting the Mecklenburg County School Division in the vertical and horizontal implementation of SIF by providing an agent that allows data from Star_Base School Suite to pass easily from the student information system to the Virginia Department of Education’s Educational Information Management System (EIMS) and the food services program. . The Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) is a sophisticated, Service–Oriented Architecture developed to solve this challenge through a standards–based IT infrastructure and technologies “Century’s SIF agent provides the ability to connect our databases together so communication between databases is seamless. We simply could not have made this work without the support of Century. Their technical team and customer service are great and I would recommend them to any school division,” declared Mr. Connor.