GETTING PERSONAL IN TEXAS
Meet two light-hearted, hard-thinking women from Saint Andrew Catholic School in Fort Worth, Texas: Mary Gillilan, Database Manager and Network Administrator, and Beverly Watkins, Business Manager. Together, they have given 40 years of service to the school. Together, they manage data for the admissions, registrar, development, and business offices and Mary oversees the entire school network.
According to the school web site, “Saint Andrew Catholic School is the parish school for the community of Saint Andrew Catholic Church located in the TCU area on the near southwest side of Fort Worth...Most of the students are children of the Saint Andrew parish family.” The school has a steady enrollment of 700 students, from preschool through Grade 8. Principal Clarice Peninger recently received the National Distinguished Principal Award. “Ms. Peninger sees this award as one that recognizes that Saint Andrew Catholic School is one of the best schools in the United States.”1
Our conversation with Mary and Beverly took place at the end of a full day of intensive training at inRESONANCE University (iRU). This was Mary’s third time attending iRU, and Beverly’s second. Mary was following the track for experienced iR users, “Customizing Your Solution.” Beverly was training on PORTAL and GENERATIONS. “I need to do lots of tweaking for the report cards,” Mary explained, “and a family-student directory.”
At the end of the workshop day, Mary and Beverly participated in an ad hoc session to preview iR’s Auctions module with iR’s Chief of Product Development Charlie Bailey. Most attendees had already left to explore Northampton, but Mary and Beverly stayed on to talk about their school and the inRESONANCE solutions. They are loyal fans.
When asked to describe the special quality of Saint Andrew Catholic School, Beverly did not hesitate to offer, “What makes our school special is the religious aspect we can offer the children.”
Mary elaborated: “Our school is one of the largest in our diocese. It’s also one of the largest in the state of Texas. We were one of the first to use computers with kids, back with TRS80s. We were the first school to be networked in Tarrant County, public or private.”
Beverly added the color comment: “Mary pulled some of the cable herself. It ruins your nails.”
The school has kept pace with good practices in educational technology. Mary described the current state of the school, saying, “Saint Andrew’s is doing really well. Every teacher has a laptop provided by the school. We have mobile labs. We installed ISDN connections to the internet nine years ago. Now we have two T1s [which are 24 times faster-ed.]. We’ve grown and grown.”
She alluded to some of the challenges of ever-increasing access: “The students’ use of the internet has grown, too, of course. We have experienced all those little quirks with myspace.com...the filtering became important.”
Saint Andrew Catholic School has a long relationship with inRESONANCE. Clarice Peninger, who will retire from Saint Andrew in 2009, was a part of the Apple Core Trainers grant program, begun by Apple Computer in the early 1990s. inRESONANCE CEO Kevin McAllister was also part of the Apple Core (as was Susan McAllister); Kevin McAllister and Peninger first met as educators whom Apple Computer brought together to envision ways to incorporate technology into the classroom.
Mary began at the school 23 years ago, as a parent of a Kindergarten student. She took a brief hiatus to work for a Catholic inner city school in San Antonio for three years, but then Mary returned to Saint Andrew. This is Beverly’s 19th year. Mary and Beverly, who work as a team to manage all the school data, started with FileMaker 4, using flat files to track tuition and student information. “Then it became relational,” Mary remembered—1995. Saint Andrew first installed KEYSTONE in 2003. In 2008, they added PORTAL and GENERATIONS, a vote of commitment to the iR suite of products. In the intervening years, however, the administration of the school had wavered, trying two other administrative databases.
Mary and Beverly looked back with a sense of humor.
“We left. We came back. We left. We came back,” Mary explained. Her understated delivery projected volumes about the disruptions she was too polite to describe.
Beverly added, “I never left at all.”
Mary went on, “The school bought another system, but we weren’t sure how it was going to work, so Beverly and I kept both sides going simultaneously. The first ‘new’ software didn’t have any financial component. The second one was so scary we didn’t dare stop running KEYSTONE in the background.”
While the administration was exploring its options, Beverly was clear about her preferences: “I told the Principal that we had gone from a Cadillac to a used Volkswagon, and I wanted my Cadillac back.”
“inRESONANCE is so powerful,” Mary went on. “Even when we only use a little tip of it. We just recently started with PORTAL and GENERATIONS, we’re barely using it. But the potential is there to do all kinds of things.”
Beverly predicted: “GENERATIONS should actually make us money.”
Beverly and Mary shared their enthusiasm about the potential of iR’s fundraising solution in a cross-current: “We can perform finds and sorts on people using all these details...we have the ability to target individuals and then reach out because we have that data on them...we can send auction invitations to the church people and the school families...and we can personalize it...the more personalized you can get, the more they will open up their pocketbooks...
“In the past, we had a list of major donors. We contacted them, relying on what we could remember....We never gave the other donors a chance to move up....We used generic thank you letters and it didn’t mean anything....It will be so useful to keep all that information. It was too cumbersome to track it in the past, we didn’t have a good way to do it.”
Last year the school wanted to start sending out email communications, so they developed a family liaison group. Mary compiled all the emails, including multiple email addresses for constituents who had them, created some extra fields, and distributed lists for each homeroom to the group. This year, she’s hoping to simplify the process by taking it all back in-house and communicating through BROADCASTER, which is built in to the iR solutions.
Mary is also looking forward to the installation of the Family Access Module (FAM) over the winter, which will push data from KEYSTONE to the web. Using FAM, families will be able to view their child’s term-end grades and comments, track attendance, and change parent contact information.
“This will mean a lot less printing and mailing,” Beverly pointed out, an obvious benefit for two high-spirited multi-taskers who work at the hub of one of the largest Catholic schools in the state of Texas. This savings of time and expense will free them up, no doubt, to create bid sheets for the next auction, fill the database with donor lists, monitor students’ internet use, train faculty on the new process for grades and comments, and get the next broadcast email ready...all those quirky little details that go into running the business of the school.
Learn more about Saint Andrew Catholic School in Fort Worth, Texas.
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1. Saint Andrew School web site, “About St. Andrew” http://www.standrewsch.org back