Prince George’s County Public Schools (MD) Selects Synergy Education Platform

State-of-the-art student data management ecosystem will bring efficiencies and enhancements to one of the largest districts in the country

Edupoint® Educational Systems today announced that Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) has selected the company’s industry-leading Synergy® Education Platform for its K-12 student information and learning management needs. The district’s solution will include Synergy Student Information System (SIS), Synergy Online Registration, Synergy MTSS, and Synergy Analytics, to be hosted in the Synergy AWS Cloud environment. PGCPS is one of the 20 largest school districts in the country, serving over 128,000 students across 206 schools in Maryland’s Capital Region adjacent to Washington, D.C.

PGCPS set out to find a modern, intuitive SIS to replace its current 15-year-old system. After researching the marketplace and speaking with peers in nearby districts, the team at PGCPS selected three products to evaluate in depth. First, the IT team investigated all three solutions to ensure they met requirements around core functionality. Next, a cross-functional stakeholder group – consisting of more than 60 parents, students, teachers, secretaries, principals, IT staff, and other central office department leaders – attended a “demo day” and rated the products on user-friendliness of the interface, mobile responsiveness, system accessibility and scalability, software customization, integration with other systems, and communication. In the final round, schedulers from five middle and high schools, along with 23 staff from the district’s accountability, academics, and student services teams undertook a deeper exploration of system functionality around scheduling, data analysis, and reporting. After emerging as a demo-day favorite, Synergy Education Platform clinched the top spot in the final round.

Synergy Education Platform is a comprehensive ecosystem that combines student information management, MTSS, analytics, special education, and more in one seamless platform that includes a powerful suite of native, role-based mobile apps. With Synergy, PGCPS will get a state-of-the-art platform capable of meeting the varied needs of the district’s broad user base while keeping pace with advancements and innovations within the district and in K-12 public education more generally. Synergy includes powerful tools that facilitate convenient communication districtwide, including between schools and with parents and students. The MTSS module will allow teachers and interventionists to access all student data in one place, eliminating the need to log into an additional system to access SIS data.

“Synergy consistently ranked very high on customer service and product support based on feedback from our colleagues in benchmarked districts,” said Andrew Zuckerman, EdD, Chief Information and Technology Officer at PGCPS. “And throughout the evaluation process, Synergy consistently earned the highest marks from our stakeholder evaluators.”

“Our audience was impressed with Synergy and the Edupoint team,” said Jinghong Gao, Director of Technology Applications–Student Support at the district. “The flexibility the system can provide us with its configurability and workflow definition features really stood out in the demonstrations. We are enthusiastic about the potential for building processes to support our needs in Synergy rather than having to rely on third-party systems. The two-way communication capabilities between schools and with parents and students were also exciting to see and will fill a gap we have in our current system.”

“Prince Georges County Public Schools needed a modern student data management system to replace its legacy system and open up new possibilities for efficiencies and enhancements,” said Bob Weathers, Founder and CEO at Edupoint. “Synergy Education Platform, with its seamlessly integrated, comprehensive functionality, is perfectly positioned to support the amazing PGCPS team in this regard. We are thrilled to partner with the district to upgrade the technical toolset available to the talented team there in order to meet the varied needs of all stakeholders.”