Hawaiʻi DOE sets New Standard in K-12 Data Culture (2024)

The Hawaiʻi Department of Education (HIDOE) is successfully transforming into a data-driven organization that leverages technology to identify opportunities for student success and improve educational outcomes. As Data Governance & Analysis Branch Administrator, Shane Hedani and his dedicated core team of five have discovered innovative ways to engage internal educators and external stakeholders with PowerSchool Analytics & Insights and PowerSchool Community Engagement.

“When new teachers come in, this data tool is their goldmine,” says Hedani. “Having longitudinal student history is like finding treasure along the shore.”

With these flexible PowerSchool solutions, HIDOE has greater access to view student progress across its system. This results in improved statewide alignment around student achievement. The Hawaiʻi Department of Education (HIDOE) has used PowerSchool products for over a decade and found great success.

Hawaiʻi’s public school system was founded on Oct. 15, 1840, by King Kamehameha III. The oldest public school system west of the Mississippi, HIDOE oversees 295 schools that belong to one statewide district with over 167,600 students. The Department employs about 13,000 teachers, librarians, and counselors. Alongside 12,000 educational officers, civil servants, and support personnel, they work to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity for a high-quality education.

Connecting Data Across the State with PowerSchool Solutions

With help from PowerSchool’s implementation team in 2022, HIDOE migrated all SIS and assessment data from on-premises hosting into the cloud, resulting in better functionality, world-class cybersecurity, and an improved user experience.

Now, HIDOE uses to understand their consistently updated data across nearly 300 schools for enhanced planning and data-driven decision-making. Since implementing an upgrade in the fall of 2022, teacher usage has increased, and data is connected across every school on a platform that is dynamic and up-to-date. This has fostered a culture shift toward greater interest in student success across the entire state.

• The HIDOE uses their solution, which they branded as the Longitudinal Educational Information (LEI Kūlia) to help new teachers and the broader community understand that they have a system of support that schools and students can depend on. The name of Kūlia comes from Hawaiʻi’s Queen Kapi’olani’s motto Kūlia i ka nu’u, which means to “strive for the highest, strive for excellence.” As Shane Hedani says, this “is always the aspiration of teachers and schools… for all students to achieve their goals, graduate, and go onto postsecondary success.”
• Their system has seen over 7,200 users to date, with a goal of 10,000 educators by 2026, and all 14,000 educators by 2028. Their system usage has doubled in less than three years.

• HIDOE also uses PowerSchool Community Engagement as its center for public-facing data. Branded as Kukui, it is named for the candlenut that was traditionally used for lighting the night and also used as a metaphor for enlightenment. “The value of Kukui is that the community can always find what they need,” says Shane Hedani. “It started from a few hundred users, and now we can get up to 370 users in a day.”

• Hedani’s team cites the flexibility across Kūlia and Kukui as the main asset that helps them support student programs with great success, including alternative programs, sports programs and more. “We can identify students in cohorts,” he says, “and then dynamically create student groups to follow based on success in school and in postsecondary education,” he explains.

Hawaiʻi DOE’s Impact on its Community and Students

When a fire suddenly raged through Lahaina in August 2023, the Hawaiʻi DOE got right to work finding which students needed assistance. The State Coordinator for Homeless Children and Youth used the PowerSchool Analytics & Insights geospatial tool and a cohort of impacted schools’ enrollment rosters to identify the students who lived in the affected area. The coordinator was then able to take her laptop to the area shelters and register unsheltered students for assistance.

“With the new upgrade came the geospatial tool, and we were able to incorporate the student group feature with the geographical data to identify right away how many students were impacted and to help and support the staff in providing services to the students and their families,” says Hedani.

Hawai’i Looks to the Future, with help from PowerSchool

The team at HIDOE’s Office of Strategy, Innovation, and Performance believes that data is not as impactful as the story it tells. So, their public-facing community engagement solution, powered by PowerSchool Community Engagement, shares school-created stories behind the data that can be shared with external partners. For example, they share stories about the progress of the Department’s strategic plan performance measures and include explanations about what the data means and how it was calculated. Scheduled for late December 2024, HIDOE plans to remodel Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) data dashboards with the same look and feel of this community engagement module to streamline navigation and make data easy to find and understand.

HIDOE is targeting the LEI Kukui system as the single portal to share educational data with external partners. Internally, they are planning to integrate LEI Kūlia’s Analytics & Insights data into Connected Intelligence to power AI tools like PowerBuddy for Data Analysis and lay the groundwork for MTSS processes.

The Hawaiʻi Department of Education (HIDOE) has successfully leveraged PowerSchool’s Analytics & Insights and Community Engagement tools to build a data-driven culture across the state. By migrating data to the cloud and implementing user-friendly dashboards, HIDOE has empowered teachers and administrators to make informed decisions. The Longitudinal Educational Information (LEI) Kūlia system, coupled with the public-facing Kukui platform, has facilitated data sharing and increased transparency. A notable example of the system’s impact was demonstrated during the Lahaina fire, where HIDOE quickly identified and assisted affected students. Looking ahead, HIDOE plans to further integrate data and storytelling to enhance its data-driven approach.