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Re: Airtable for School Information System (SIS)?

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Stephen_Piscura
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Hi there, i’m new here. My question in a nutshell is if anyone has had success building out the equivalent of a School Information System (SIS) using Airtable. Read on for more detail.

My wife and i and a small team are founding a new school for children in our community. We’ll start K–2 this fall and—should our prayers be answers—we’ll add a grade level each year all the way to grade 12. To date, we’ve been building out and refining all of our core systems, and now we’re researching a significant decision that virtually all schools face: choosing a SIS.

There’s a million of these systems out there and they all seem to take a kind of everything-you’ll-ever-need-in-one-place approach. Our workflow, however, is heavily dependent on SAAS. We use G Suite (email and productivity), Asana (tasks/project management), HubSpot (donor management), PieSync (keeping contacts in sync), Calendly (appointment scheduler), Eventbrite (fundraisers), Aplos (bookkeeping), Zapier (to tie everything together as much as we can), and some other things too. The everything-under-one-roof approach boasted by most SISs doesn’t really appeal to us (i.e. we don’t want a cute little calendar, when Google Calendar is so much better; we don’t want a half-baked project manager, when Asana is so much better, and so on). Instead, our preference is to pick the best tools we can and then automate our processes with something like Zapier.

Here’s a list of the baked-in features offered by one of the most popular SISs, called FACTS (formerly RenWeb):

  • Admissions
  • Attendance
  • Cafeteria management
  • Communication
  • Comprehensive reporting
  • Health information management
  • Integration partners and services
  • Report cards
  • Scheduling
  • Staff information management
  • Standards-based grading
  • Student behavior tracking
  • Student and family information management
  • Transcripts
    https://factsmgt.com/administration/student-information-system/

We most certainly don’t need all of that—especially as a small school startup—but we will need some of it (admissions, attendance, student tracking, grade books, report cards, etc.).

I would be extremely grateful to learn about the experiences of anyone working in a school environment who may be using Airtable to fulfill some (or many) of these functions.

Thanks in advance and thanks for reading!

10 Replies 10
Plinio_Averbach
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

I’ve made my own, it has:

  • Admissions
  • Comprehensive reporting
  • Integration partners and services
  • Scheduling
  • Staff information management

It was kind of hard to make, but it is really flexible!

Whoa @Plinio_Averbach, that’s really really encouraging to read! If ever you decide/have time to describe your process in any more detail, i would be very eager to learn more! Really appreciate your feedback.

Plinio_Averbach
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

My main problem describing is the language!
=)

It took me ~20 days working ~1 hour a day

Now my students recive a form and they put all their info (name, adress, etc.) My sales squad puts the values and Put in each classes they are in.
Zappier puts them on the mailing list and generate theyer certificate, a python program generate the calendar.

After they are in a class, we define the teachers from a dropdown and it is all set to go!

David_ALLEN-HUG
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Hi Stephen - just sent you an email. Would be grateful to see a copy of your setup as we are looking to do the same thing for our preschool (a more watered down version I’m sure) and I could use some inspiration!

Michelle_King
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Hi did you manage to do this? I am from a small charity for disabled children but we support alot of kids and we are struggling to separate parent and child data successfully (especially where there is more than one child in the family)

What is your base structure?

If you are going to store any protected health information, you should be aware that Airtable is not HIPPA compliant.

.

Ronald_Kanka
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

I’d love to see this too. Any one that could share a template that could generate all the CSV files I need to import SIS data to Canvas LMS that would be awesome. I’d pay !

MCGS_94
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Hi @Plinio_Averbach ,

Can you plz give me a simple guide on how you did the following :

  • Scheduling
  • Staff information management.
    Thank you in advance :slightly_smiling_face:

Hi Plinio, I would love to see what you came up with. Would you be willing to share more information?