(November 6, 2009) -- Big Brother finally has a name: Zangle, the new student data management system. With a push of a button, literally, information ranging from a student’s health history to his or her past schools or courses is brought up instantly.

The company producing Schoolmax, the old system, yanked their support for it and for yours wouldn’t give a customer timeline as to when this was going to occur. GUSD officials, after much research, decided it was time for a change from the cumbersome system, said Frank Schlueter, director of ETIS.

Eighteen months of preparation went into the project—18 months of training and running the system on new hardware. Zangle, ultimately implemented right before school started, worked in tandem with All Call—the system that sends out calls—to notify students that school was closed during the Station Fire. Even attendance and schedules on the first day—for the most part—went “fairly smooth” due to Zangle,  according to Schlueter.

Since Zangle has been implemented, the number of scheduling problems for students is “far less this year than ever before,” counselor Karen Carlson said. The only problem, she said, was that the system wasn’t completely ready over the summer—which is typically when seniors get to see and change their schedules.

One of its new features allows the staff to bring up your I.D. photo, to verify you are who you say you are, a tool, as Secretary Barbara Melone said, that  is very useful for substitute teachers trying to weed out the troublemakers. Melone added that, overall, it just helps to deal with students’ problems more quickly.

Both Melone and Schlueter agree that the possible applications of such a diverse system are broad. “There are things to fine tune and repair,” said Schlueter, but once the “core features” have been worked out, he looks forward to implementing features like a parent and student portal to increase access to this information. He believes that with a better developed “web interface” for students, features such as requesting courses will become available.

Eventually, Carlson hopes, Zangle will be able to integrate teacher gradebooks, allowing parents and students to view their performance on an assignment-by-assignment basis. She also hopes that the system might find an end for a problem the district has been coping with for many years: uploading student transcripts into the Common Application used for applying to most private colleges.