South Seneca Central School District

Suite solutions

The benefit of moving to a suite of products like Frontline is that most of the tracking is automated. Having special education and Medicaid records in the same software system helps save time, district resources and money in so many ways. They communicate. Instead of having to update multiple systems, they sync together.

Along with Medicaid Tracking & Claim Management, South Seneca uses the Medicaid Toolkit, an optimization tool that makes it easy for the district to ensure its reimbursements are accurate. It allows data to flow between the IEP & Special Education Management application and the Medicaid application, so administrators can see exactly where they’re missing data points for collecting reimbursement. As errors surface, it’s a simple process to resubmit documents and bring in thousands of dollars in found reimbursements that normally would be left on the table.

The district tracks students starting when they enroll in pre-kindergarten or as early as age 2 if they’re referred for evaluation or services. As soon as student data is entered, it’s available to upload for state reports. The software also makes it easy to track all the child outcome summaries and evaluations for preschool.

As students advance through grade levels each year, Frontline RTI Management is right there to support them. The system helps track the progress made by struggling learners over time. When teachers enter their interventions and data points, graphs create a clear picture of student performance. If students don’t respond to interventions, the data is useful for determining whether they might be eligible for special-education services.

Professional learning options for all

Frontline makes it easy for teachers to select and register for professional learning opportunities. Calendars show all offerings, not only from the district but also from the regional information center. It’s one-stop shopping for anybody who’s looking for a professional growth opportunity. If it’s not on the menu, the system has the capacity for users to enter requests for conferences and other learning opportunities that aren’t listed. Forms are already pre-populated to make entering the information simple.

Teachers and staff have autonomy in chasing down the opportunities that make sense to them in their own careers. Based on teacher evaluation results, supervisors direct some professional learning opportunities through Frontline’s Professional Growth software, but most are self-selected by the users. Keeping track of professional learning helps teachers and staff stay current in their fields.

Using Frontline Professional Growth as part of the connected platform is not only efficient, but it has definitely impacted the budget. For one thing, the product itself is affordable. The fact that it saves time and money by syncing up with the New York state data warehouse for teacher certification is another advantage. District administrators are confident that since so much of it is automated, the data will get to where it needs to go without mistakes.

Absence Management tackles substitute shortages

Remember those early morning phone calls the substitute coordinator had to make looking for substitutes? It was a full-time job for one person to arrange coverage for every open position.

South Seneca now relies on Frontline to help fill teacher absences. Every district struggles with a shortage of substitute teachers. That will always be a challenge. But because Frontline Absence Management is a regional service used by all of the local school systems, anyone who is a substitute in South Seneca schools and also in neighboring districts uses the same system.

It’s great from the substitute teacher’s angle and from the district’s perspective, too. For substitutes, they don’t have to continually log into different applications to check all the jobs available to them. And the districts benefit by the features built into Absence Management to prevent job-hopping, where a substitute cancels a job at the last minute to take one in another district.

Connecting Professional Growth with Absence & Time is another efficiency for the district. Since the system creates absences automatically when teachers plan to be out of the classroom for professional learning, it makes it easier to fill the positions in advance.