The Bayonne Public School District serves the densely populated, largely blue-collar community of Bayonne, NJ. Its 12 schools serve some 8,000 students, including 1,500 special-needs students ages 3 to 21.

While Bayonne has been recognized as one of the top 25 districts in New Jersey for technology, it’s technology infrastructure had not met its varied administrative needs. The problem was especially keen in the Special Services department, where multiple databases containing student records were not linked, so that changes made to one database had to be manually entered into each of the others.

Further, district special-needs educators, who worked throughout the district, couldn't easily access and review the individual education plans (IEPs) for their students because of the lack of a single, integrated database that could be accessed easily at any time from any location. It was impossible to effectively report progress to parents in a timely fashion. And the increasing range of federal government standards was upping the ante on paperwork for each student.

When it came time for Carol Trojan, Director of Special Services for the Bayonne Schools, to complete the annual state-mandated report on the district’s special-needs population, it took her a week to manually tally data for the 11 required tables-and a single error would force her to review all the figures to make a correction.

“I took the work home and it still took me a week to complete,” says Trojan. “It was overwhelming. And it kept me from working on programs that would directly serve the needs of our students. I swore we'd never complete a report this way again.”

Trojan and the district wanted to replace their existing infrastructure with a single database solution, accessible to authorized users anytime, anywhere, that would allow educators to identify the special educational needs of each student, generate federal and state mandated reports, and create district-level analyses without the manual processes they had been using.

Since 1986, TIECorp, located in Red Bank, New Jersey, has been developing and implementing technology-based instructional management and special education solutions for hundreds of educational settings throughout the country. Its Web-based TIENET product provides a cohesive system which manages all functions related to the instructional process.

Bayonne schools chose TIECorp to implement its integrated Special Services database solution both because of the strengths of its solution and because of its reputation for quality service.

“Everything we'd heard about TIECorp was borne out by our experience with them,” says Trojan. “They were always supportive. Whenever we called with a question, we had an answer by the end of the day. The TIECorp people are very good at what they do and very attuned to state government requirements, so they could anticipate the changes that we needed to accommodate.”

The Bayonne school district has the database solution it wanted in TIECorp’s TIENET, a Web-based instructional management infrastructure solution designed for K-12 schools and districts. TIENET addresses both accountability and mandated-reporting requirements related to delivering instructional services to students in both regular and special education.

TIENET is a three-tier Web-based solution based on the Microsoft® Windows Server System™ and the Microsoft .NET Framework:

• At the presentation layer, a Web Server running Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server with Internet Information Services (IIS) supports an ASP.NET application layer that authorized users can access from any standard Web browser. Users can access a comprehensive calendaring system, special needs workflow processes, and IEPs for their students.
• Business logic components that enable the solution, and serve as a bridge between the presentation and database layers, were custom created by TIECorp using Microsoft Visual C#® and the Visual Studio® .NET integrated development environment. The business logic provides a sophisticated ad-hoc reporting system that includes multi-dimensional analysis with graphics. The business logic also enforces a sophisticated security model based on access privileges, users, and user groups.
• The database layer is based on Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000. A custom application component utilizing XML-based Web services and SQL Server data transformation services (DTS) integrates the solution with the district's existing, legacy data systems, including the student information systems data.

TIECorp customized and deployed the solution-including importing data from Bayonne’s legacy solutions and training its staff-in three months. Teachers and administrators have access to the documents they need to create, access, and work with IEPs. They can also generate online progress reports. SSL-encryption enables teachers to access the solution over the Internet, even from their homes or other locations outside of school property, while restricting access to authorized users.