What happens when 30 of Georgia Tech’s brightest minds team up with Fulton County Schools to tackle real-world challenges in public education? You get innovative solutions that have the potential to transform K-12 student outcomes.

This spring, 30 graduate students from the Master of Science in Analytics (MSA) program chose to collaborate with the Fulton County Schools IT Division for their capstone practicum experience. This semester-long project allowed students to apply their data science training to real-world challenges faced by the school district.

MSA students worked with Fulton County Schools IT staff; the 4th largest school district in Georgia, the 35th largest school district in the United States, and the largest non-contiguous school district in the nation. The district’s size and geography offer additional data interoperability challenges. These challenges include fragmented data systems, difficulty obtaining real-time insights, and equitable access to reliable data. 

For several months during the spring semester, these talented teams worked closely with the school district’s IT division to develop tools designed to gain insights intended to improve how the district serves its over 86,000 students. Some of their impressive works include:

• Building Microsoft-based dashboards: These dashboards help educators take actionable steps aligned with Georgia Department of Education metrics, providing a clearer picture of student performance and areas needing attention.
• Implementing an AI-powered Virtual Counselor chatbot: This innovative tool supports students in meeting graduation requirements by offering personalized guidance and resources.
• Creating a recommendation engine: This engine matches students with personalized learning resources, ensuring that each student receives the support they need to succeed.
• Designing models to forecast budget needs: By using historical trends and enrollment projections, these models help the district plan and allocate resources more effectively.

Georgia Tech students submitted a total of 13 projects focused on continuous improvement in the school district.We extend our heartfelt thanks for their creativity, commitment, and belief that data and technology can drive meaningful changes in education. Their work not only showcases the power of collaboration but also sets a precedent for future partnerships aimed at improving student outcomes.

To shed light on student reflections, Alejandra Sevilla, an MSA student, recently commented, “It’s been incredibly rewarding to use data to support K-12 education and create something that could actually help real students and educators.”  Another student, Hariprasad Ramamoorthy, explained that “working with FCS has been a valuable and insightful experience, and I truly appreciate the collaboration and support throughout.”

Students were encouraged to submit a project that could be implemented in Fulton County’s current established Microsoft ecosystem. MSA students and Fulton staff met regularly to discuss the various MSFT tools available to Georgia Tech students in weekly meetings and how to implement their solutions. These collaborative meetings also offered students a chance to learn about FERPA compliance, student data requests, legal issues surrounding cameras in classrooms, handling outliers and duplicate records, technical challenges in data scraping, data modelling, and data governance. 

Georgia Tech alum Heather Trotter Clark (MSA 21) says the collaboration goes beyond analyzing data and test scores. It’s providing students with meaningful, actionable support on their path to success.

“The tool is there for them to use in a safe, secure environment, completely customized to their academic environment, their academic experience, in real time,” said Trotter Clark, who serves as Director of Data Management for Fulton County Schools and is a former schoolteacher. “Students and their parents have something tailored to them specifically to say, ‘OK I can do this because everything I need, I see it, I have it right here in front of me.’” 

This initiative exemplifies a successful collaboration between higher education institutions and public-school systems to work together to address real-world challenges that ultimately benefit students and educators alike.

Author: Heather Trotter Clark - Data Management Director, Fulton County Schools