The Hastings School Board and Hastings Public Schools are working on creating more transparent data and availability to the public through the creation of a public data dashboard. Superintendent Dr. Kristine Werkamp-Herman said the district uses data to make a lot of the decisions and give direction to staff, and soon that data will be available to the public.
“So basically we will be able to take a lot of data that we look at every day, and get it out into a public facing platform that is easy to read and understand. That might be academic achievement data, attendance data, activity involvement data, all of that kind of thing right on our website as the dashboard that people can look at and get some of those questions answered. Including some financial data as well. Now we post all of our financial data online through our audit process on that finance page, but the data dashboard can take some of those highlights and pop it right in that spot.”
Dr. Werkamp-Herman also said this is a trend among many other school districts to try and make sure parents and community members are informed, but they want to make sure the data they provide is easy to understand and what the Hastings School District community wants to view.
“I do believe most schools are doing some of this work in one fashion or another, and we’re trying to make sure we do it the Hastings way and make sure it looks the way we want it to look. It’s always continuous improvement, so for example some of the data we might get pushed out immediately, we find that nobody is as interested in as maybe other data so we might have to change things as we go. But we’ll just be amenable to that and make changes as we need to.”
Dr. Werkamp-Herman said the data dashboard is projected to be available in late May.