Retaining Knowledge

Fast growing school districts face unique challenges in staffing. Their needs for more qualified personnel expand as the district grows, creating stress on existing personnel, and creating unique challenges for new hires as they get up to speed on what has been done, what established practices are, and what is expected from the new job.

 Turnover is costlier and causes more problems than ISDs realize

 In almost every case, when one of your best employees walks out the door, the knowledge of what they did and how they did it, walks out the door with them.

 Board members also come and go. New members need training and an efficient onboarding to the dynamic operations of the district and the requirements of their new position. If that can be provided to them in a searchable, easily navigable system, without the need of extensive administrative time to guide them; all parties benefit.

Likewise, your vendors are facing the same turnover problem. Their employees are being recruited elsewhere, and new people are coming in all the time.

AEC Schools captures, organizes, and indexes your district’s dynamic information and projects. Utilization of this system allows board members, administrators, principals and vendors to provide and find information on their work. allowing others to quickly learn what was done, when, and why. The information is accessible with just a couple of clicks.

Getting More Value from Your Vendors

Our fast-growing districts use thousands of vendors to provide goods and services for the benefit of our students, parents, and communities. Up until now, stakeholders have had access to little more than the information contained on their invoices. AEC Schools goes way beyond the topline financials to provide the district with the who, what, where, when, why and how behind the provision of those goods and services.

When a vendor provides you with the details of the product or service they delivered and what is important for you to know about it, through AEC Schools, they deliver 2 important benefits for you. First, they provide real-time status of their work to all stakeholders on the systems. Second, they participate in the long-term knowledge system for the district that captures who did what, when, how and why. Districts can learn more about the capabilities and proficiency of their vendors and  more easily take their advice.  This is how you can maximize the value of all the district investments. When new needs arise, they can more efficiently leverage their vendors to help supply ideas, approaches, and solutions to those needs.

Districts can also evaluate the provisioning of these goods and services and share vendor information with their colleagues on other districts. Vendors benefit by sharing, in their own words and work, the services and value they provide. They can also make their value known to other districts, by indexing their information resulting in better search results for the entire state.

Streamlined Planning and Leadership Evaluations

As with so many of the issues districts face, strategic planning and leadership evaluations are, in reality, a dynamic and continual process. Changes to decisions, new ideas, and adjustments to plans occur every day in our districts. Capturing all of this in a report and sharing it once a quarter within a static report that ends up in a binder on the shelf. AEC Schools allows for real time collaboration, monitoring, and reporting. Key participants in strategic planning and leadership evaluations can engage in discussions, debate, and the evaluations of ideas in real time to better monitor performance and optimize their operational environment.

Built for the Board

Ultimately, the Board of Trustees holds the ISD Administration accountable and is in turn held accountable by their constituents. The more transparent the communications between the superintendent (and cabinet) and the board, the more effectively decisions can be made. This is in the best interests of the district and the taxpayers. AEC Schools provides board members access to the critical information they need to appropriately oversee the district. Board members can easily search for the information they desire, without distracting administrative personnel. This represents a significant time savings for districts. Redundant administrative tasks are eliminated, meetings and communications are streamlined. All stakeholders benefit from a more accurate, shared understanding of goals and activities.

Stewardship of Our Tax Dollars

The population in Texas has grown 6.7% in the past 5 years. That’s more than twice as fast as the nation and the reason why construction is happening in all the major markets in the state. This is putting intense pressure on our public-school system. Over the last 5 years, Texas ISDs have passed over $50 billion in bonds to address this growing population. New schools are being built at an explosive pace and our ISDs are continuously enhancing their curriculums and technology to compete with the best education systems in the nation. This massive investment is spread across hundreds of ISDs who are working with thousands of vendors. To organize this growing ecosystem, AEC Schools captures vendor products and services by campus. ISDs license the product to bring real-time transparency to  vendor work in their district. This greater transparency for the leadership and board, shows how their staff and vendors are managing these investments. AEC Schools centralizes information around ISD administrative, facility, and operational projects. All stakeholders can input and access information, documents, share best practices, and track progress across all the projects and expenditures within their district. This represents a quantum leap forward for our state in terms of both transparency into the use of our tax dollars. Enhancing collaboration across our ISD ecosystem drives better results for our students and communities.