The Regional Information Center supports information and technology needs of school districts in Suffolk County. It is one of twelve (12) Regional Information Centers located throughout the State. Professional and cost-effective services include software training; installation, support, and maintenance for a variety of financial and student information systems; special education software support; test scoring; data warehouse and student data analysis; network design and management; Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) support; and microcomputer repair services. Our goal is to help districts use technology to make district management easier and more efficient.

Shared Data Expert: The Student Data Services Staff Developers/Shared Data Experts Program is a state-of-the art initiative that offers support to school district staff in the area of the effective use of data to facilitate informed decision making in reference to the New York State Standards for Learning. Student Data Services administrators and professional developers meet with District personnel to help formulate a customized, systemic plan to greater develop and execute the integration of data to inform instruction.

Datacentral was created in February 2002 with the arrival of the infrastructure of our data warehouse; this final piece is viewed as the culmination of several years of planning to bring the most complete array of data analysis services to component districts of the Suffolk Regional Information Center. With the wealth of data that schools are required to collect, it is crucial for administrators to be able to analyze the performance of their students in order to better inform instruction, and it is our role to provide the tools and training to school district personnel in order to make their jobs easier and to bring the focus of school improvement to the student level. Datacentral also hosts and supports two Student Application Software products, Schoolware Sun Valley Student System and SchoolMax Central Site Student System.

The staff of Datacentral is committed to providing outstanding service to internal departments (whose role is to assist various constituencies in school districts) as well as to districts in Eastern and Western Suffolk BOCES.

The Data Warehousing service, now viewed as a leader in New York State, captures various data sets and assembles them in a secure, internet-accessible warehouse; we create and generate reports that retrieve, integrate and analyze student data. Among the categories of data presently captured are demographics, NYS assessments, standardized tests, LEAP, attendance, discipline, courses & grades, and the integration of data from special education management systems. A new service, Data Warehousing "Lite" was recently created to accommodate districts that wished to begin their participation at the assessment level before delving into other student data fields. The Datacentral Advisory Panel, with representatives from many school districts, meets regularly to explore ways of improving data analysis for district personnel.

Cognos Cubes, created with Cognos PowerPlay, permit the user to analyze assessment data at various levels of disaggregation simultaneously. The data set, accessible via the internet at a secure site, is easily exportable to Microsoft Excel, statistical software (e.g. SPSS), and Adobe PDF format. Training is included with this service. Custom Cognos Cubes may be requested by districts that wish to examine data sets particular to their needs.

With the new No Child Left Behind legislation and Component Re-testing reporting requiring additional district resources, the staff of Datacentral recently joined a statewide consortium to offer Regents scanning to its districts; this service provides our clients with detailed item analyses of key Regents examinations at the student, teacher, building and district levels.

Schoolware Sun Valley Student Systems is the integrated, open system specifically designed for public school districts. This up-to-date system (Platform) includes PC, Local-Area-Network, WAN, Mini-Mainframe, or any combination. Users have access to student, family and school information for the current year, as well as historical data from prior years. This system is also Web-Enabled.

SchoolMax Central Site Student System is a graphical interface, web-based student management system with the capacity to integrate student demographics, health, teacher grade book, special education, discipline and attendance data. Users have on-line access to a single district-wide database with up-to-the-minute student, family and school information for the current year, as well as historical data from prior years. iParent provides guardians with the ability to access data via the web; iCue enables teachers to enter grades and attendance from any computer with an Internet connection.