The Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials (WASBO) has selected the School District of Fort Atkinson (SDFA) as the recipient of the 2021 Business Services award, according to information released by the school district.
The district was officially recognized at the 2021 Virtual Spring Conference. This honor carries with it a $1,000 cash award sponsored by Baird Public Finance to be used for continuing professional development, the press release stated.
“The Business Services Award is presented annually to an education institution in Wisconsin which has implemented a business practice that has resulted in an improvement in service, an increase in efficiency, or more simply, a better way of doing business,” said Baird representative Kevin Mullen within the release.
Jason Demerath, director of business services for the School District of Fort Atkinson, implemented a process to quantitatively forecast the local effect of the global pandemic, the released stated.
Heading into the 2020-2021 school year, COVID-19 numbers were increasing in Jefferson County, and the Board of Education for the School District of Fort Atkinson adopted the suggested metrics from the Jefferson County Health Department as to when schools should close to mitigate infection.
According to the release: The School District of Fort Atkinson prioritizes providing communication with staff and families as soon as possible. SDFA yearned for a prediction model that would afford the team any amount of time to prep communication in anticipation of metrics that might indicate a need for school closures, while helping to speed up the communication process.
Said Demerath: “Here (at the School District of Fort Atkinson) we would get an update at 2 p.m. every afternoon, so we were violently refreshing our web browser to see what that number was each day without having any idea of where it would go.
“We wanted to answer three main questions: How likely is it that we reach that threshold? When might we meet it and how can we prepare organizationally and communicate to parents that we might be getting there and closure might be imminent? and, If we do end up closing, when might we be able to come back?”
While searching for answers, Demerath engaged a quantitative modeling expert that had been doing some COVID-19 forecasting modeling nationally. Demerath worked closely with this expert to develop a forecast based on data that he had access to along with the Jefferson County Health Department data to decipher when the school district might meet the threshold. In the following weeks, SDFA received updates on a daily basis and utilized this forecasted data as part of the data set SDFA used along with advisement from the Jefferson County epidemiologist and local healthcare officials to determine potential expectations. This allowed SDFA to plan accordingly.
“One of the major impacts was being able to make decisions based on data. We were able to communicate what we were seeing and what might be coming to parents, community members, and to our board ahead of what transpired in real-time,” Demerath added.
The release continued: In having this unique data set, it eliminated some of the anxiousness regarding closures and a parent’s need to question: Will the district need to close tomorrow and when might students be coming back? By analyzing all of the data sets, and upon noting the predicted decline in cases, the school district was able to start bringing students with the highest need back into its buildings, and eventually, it was able to welcome the return of the entire student population.
“If we didn’t have this predictive model, then we might still be questioning: ‘Will there be a spike, will there be a spread in our schools and have to close back down?’… it provides affirmation to our board, our community, our district, and our team that trying something innovative to impact critical decision-making and using data in decision-making is important. It is the direction that we should be heading, and I think we are heading in the education industry,” Demerath said.
Jason Demerath
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