Hosted System Benefits

Secure Access

SchoolFront provides Administrators with secure system access from any Internet-connected computer using a unique username and password.

To ensure that unauthorized people do not access private information, the system will give users who have been logged in for 45 minutes the option to immediately login again and continue working without losing any unsaved work. If they do not login when prompted after 45 minutes, the system will automatically log them out so that others cannot access their information.

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• For more information about privacy and system security in SchoolFront, click here.

Data Backup

FrontEdge Inc. performs a nightly differential backup of all SchoolFront system data and performs a full backup weekly—this backed up data can be restored at the request of teachers should they accidently delete or otherwise lose information.

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• For more information about the benefits of leveraging hosted SchoolFront software, click here.

Comprehensive Support

User Support

The SchoolFront support portal provides all of the information teachers need to use the system and provides a means for teachers who need additional help to log support requests with the SchoolFront Support Team.

System Support

Many school IT groups are understaffed and already have difficulty keeping up with desktop support issues and providing the energy required to keep the school technologically up, running, and online. Members of the SchoolFront Team at FrontEdge Inc. handle the burden of SchoolFront system management, freeing school IT staff to focus time and resources on other activities.

Feature Requests

School staff members who would like to see new system features (or even adjustments to existing features) can submit requests to the development team through the SchoolFront support portal.

The FrontEdge Inc. Development Team works to continuously improve the features and functionality available in SchoolFront to address the evolving needs of SchoolFront users by means of customer feedback and customer and industry research and benchmarking.

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• For more information about support in SchoolFront, click here.

Transition Management

If you've ever been involved with introducing new technology and processes to a large group of people, you know that it requires communication, education, and enthusiastic supporters from all groups within the school community.

The SchoolFront Support Team is dedicated to assisting school system administrators as they introduce their community to SchoolFront and ease them into usage.

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• For more information about data migration and system, process, and user change management, click here.

System Configuration and Design

Studies show that training and customer support make a big impact when it comes to customer satisfaction with a school management solution.

There are one-time activities that need to take place in order to ensure a successful migration from your existing systems to SchoolFront. This includes system configuration, graphic design activities, staff training, migration of existing customer data, creation of reports (e.g. report card and transcript), integration development, etc.

The SchoolFront Team will support you through all of these activities and ensure that your new system is a success from start to steady-state.

Data Migration

If you used a different system (or multiple other systems) to manage your school's data before deciding to use SchoolFront, you may want to import the data from the other systems into SchoolFront.

Consolidating your data allows you to continue to access the old data and to report on it in the same way that you will access and report on all new data that you put into the SchoolFront system.

Customization

If schools require data fields or other changes to the fields and functionality currently supported by SchoolFront the system can be tweaked to meet the school's needs.

More Information

• If you would like to discuss your school's unique school management system requirements, please contact us.

New User Training & Support

The SchoolFront support portal provides all of the information users need to use the system and provides a means for users who need additional help to log support requests with the SchoolFront Support Team.

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• For more information about comprehensive SchoolFront system support, click here.

Operational Oversight

Centralized or Distributed Planning

School Administrators can centrally track and manage staff and course assignments in SchoolFront. SchoolFront affords school Administrators the ability to enable flexible levels of teaching staff participation in planning and system configuration.

Once staff members are added to the system, Administrator users can assign a primary teacher to every course in the system. Administrators can then either define student course enrollment in the system for the whole school or allow primary teachers to manage their own course enrollments.

Standardization

SchoolFront allows school administrators to set default rubric definitions, grading structures, and teacher report card comments for their school.

School administrators can require that teachers employ the school default rubrics, grading structures, and comments to standardize the way the school handles grades and report cards. Or teachers can be allowed to use school defaults as a baseline for defining customized grading and commentary for their courses.

Performance Management

SchoolFront allows school administrators to review the coursework teachers have prepared in the system as well as teacher grading systems and ultimate student performance. Easily accessing and analyzing this data allows administrators to plan and set academic policies, and then to measure adherence to the policies using reports.

For example, Schools Under Registration Review (SURR) require diligence and consistency in assignment of coursework—SchoolFront enables administrators to run reports per teacher and per course which lend visibility into the good work teachers are doing in the school to meet SURR requirements.

Powerful & Easy Reporting

School, District, & State Operational Reporting

The SchoolFront system aggregates a great deal of valuable student, teacher, and operational data which can be viewed and analyzed in reports. SchoolFront is equipped with standard built-in reports for Administrators and other school staff.

Report Cards

Final grades in SchoolFront are calculated automatically by the system using the individual coursework grades that teachers enter into their SchoolFront gradebooks and parameters for grading defined by the school or teacher.

Report cards can be generated from the final grading information. Teachers can add comments to final grades and report cards can be formatted to the school's liking. School branding, logo, and colors can be added to further customize the look of report cards.

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• For more information about report card preparation and production in SchoolFront, click here.

Student Transcripts

When students change schools or apply for college a comprehensive transcript is frequently required during the transition or application process. SchoolFront allows you to run transcripts easily for one or more students at a time and to produce copies in both printable and digital formats for distribution.

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• For more information about student transcript production in SchoolFront, click here.

Report Development

In addition to the standard built-in reports currently offered with SchoolFront, the SchoolFront Support Team encourages members of the school staffs that they serve to suggest / request new reports that will better enable them to do their jobs, analyze student and staff performance, and plan for success.

Teachers and administrators who would like new reports can request them via the SchoolFront Support Portal. If a requested report is critical to a teacher, administrator or district the SchoolFront Support Team will reach out to the district administrators to discuss custom development.

If the report is deemed valuable to the whole of the SchoolFront user-base, the FrontEdge Inc. Development Team will develop it for free and add it to the standard SchoolFront reports so that all customers can use it.

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• For more information on custom development & development partnering, click here.

Collaborative Teaching

Team- & Co-Teaching

SchoolFront requires that one teacher be the primary teacher associated with a course. The primary teacher can add "team teachers" to the course so that the other teachers can edit the course information and manage coursework, rubrics, grading, and attendance for the course with the primary teacher. This capability is particularly helpful to schools with special education programs, student teachers, and substitute teachers.

Instructional Continuity

To ensure that classes continue to function in the absence of the primary teacher, SchoolFront helps teachers and administrators to prepare a substitute teacher to handle the class until the primary teacher's return.

Short-term Substitution

If the primary teacher will only be out for a short period of time a printout of all pertinent course information can be provided to the substitute teacher so that they can take attendance and capture grading without having to learn to use SchoolFront to do it. When the teacher returns, they can then easily transfer the information the substitute teacher collected into the system.

Longer-term Substitution

If a teacher will be out of class for a longer period of time, the long-term substitute teacher may be added to SchoolFront as a staff member. Once they are in the system, an administrator or the primary teacher can temporarily add them to the teaching team and they will have the same abilities and access and manage course information as other team teachers.

School Website & Pages

Public & Private / Restricted Pages

SchoolFront's website hosting and content management system allows schools and districts to create and easily maintain school-branded websites. It also allows teachers and staff to create and collaboratively maintain sub-sites within the school website for just about any purpose. Collaborative maintenance means that staff members can give other staff members, and even students or parents, permission to help them maintain sub-site content. Here are some examples:

Department Pages

Post an overview of the department and charter. List department members and chairpersons. Post course offering and descriptions. Post department member profiles, contact information, pictures, and link to teacher pages.

Teacher / Staff Pages

Teachers can maintain their own homepages with any content they desire. This could include lists of the classes and activities they lead, links to websites with information relevant to coursework, links to course pages, etc.

Course / Classroom Pages

Pages can be created by teachers and teaching teams to support specific courses. As with Teacher / Staff Pages, course pages can host just about any content a teacher or staff member desires.

Activity / Extracurricular Pages

Pages can be created by teachers and teaching teams to support specific activities like sports and clubs.

As with Course Pages, activity pages can host just about any content a teacher or staff member desires. If a club has a student president or group of students who are responsible for the operation of the club, the primary staff member responsible for the activity can grant one or more students permission to edit activity page content.

More Information

• For more information about teacher and classroom webpages in SchoolFront, click here.

Ways to Communicate

School Announcements

School Administrators can use the SchoolFront Announcements capability to create targeted messages to specific groups within the school community or to send blanket messages to the whole school community.

Announcements can be designed to appear to targeted groups for a specific period of time (e.g. A message about Flu Shots can be scheduled to be visible from September 1st to December 12th) or indefinitely (e.g. the motto of the school).

When a user of a targeted group logs into their SchoolFront portal, they will see messages Administrators have created for them.

Mail-Merge Capability

SchoolFront supports the generation of mail-merges to create personalized mailer content for parents with salutation, addressing, and information tailored specifically to them and their child or children.

For example, a mail-merge could be created for all the parents of all children in a specific class that included a note written by the teacher, but then listed the academic information (grades and attendance) of only the child of the parent to whom the mailer was addressed.

School Calendar

School Administrators can centrally manage the school’s official calendar in SchoolFront, depicting official holidays, staff training days, special school events, lunch menus, etc.

All members of the school community can login to their SchoolFront portals to see up-to-date and detailed school calendar information at any time.

Other Ways to Communicate

• For more information about SchoolFront's communication capabilities, click here.

Student Information

Personal & Academic Information

The system allows Administrators to centrally manage and access important personal and academic information for every student in the school. The system supports batch import of student information and all information in the system can easily be updated by an authorized school staff member.

Parents and guardians living in the same or separate residences can also be tracked in the system along with their contact information.

Comprehensive 360 Degree Profile

A student’s personal information records and parent/guardian information are linked to his or her course enrollment, academic record, attendance record, and disciplinary record in the system making it simple for Administrators to login and access comprehensive up-to-date information about any student in the school at any time.

More Information

• For more information about the management of student information in SchoolFront, click here.

Historical/Longitudinal Data

Historical Grades, Test Scores, & Operational Information

SchoolFront supports the tracking and management of historical academic information, standardized test scores, and performance data.

Schools that use SchoolFront for many years will continue to have access to historical data from previous years. New customers can import data from past years into SchoolFront so that the data can be used for reference and reporting purposes.

Transcripts & Other Reporting

Student transcripts can be generated and viewed in print or online. Longitudinal reports can be run from any information stored in the system across years of stored data.

Discipline Management

SchoolFront facilitates management and tracking of the disciplinary process in schools. In the event that disciplinary action is required for a student, the system supports the logging of details of the incident as well as the consequences assigned to the student.

SchoolFront makes management of disciplinary measures a collaborative endeavor, allowing school staff members to view and process incidents in a single, central, and up-to-date directory.

Disciplinary incidents can be escalated where necessary, tracked to conclusion, and accessed for reference by members of the school staff even after they are closed.

More Information

• For more information about the management of student discipline and merit in SchoolFront, click here.

Event Coordination

School staff members can create and collaboratively maintain private or publicly-accessible pages for school events like sports, dances, music, or theater.

Collaborative maintenance means that staff members can give other staff members, and even students or parents, permission to help them maintain event content.

Event information, pictures, calendars, etc. can be displayed on the page and event tickets can be sold on and purchased from the page.