Consider this scenario.  A secretary in the transportation department enters data about a new pupil who just moved into the district. Separately, another secretary elsewhere in the district enters data about the same student in the student information database.  

Not only is the same data entry work done twice, there is no guarantee the information about this student is either correct or identical. Nor is there any assurance this pupil’s data in food service, library services or any of the several other school functions that may capture his or her data, will be identical with either transportation or student information.

Anyone who’s entered or extracted data from a Student Information System knows the weakness of standalone software applications is that they function in isolation. As a consequence, critical student information often suffers from data integrity, reporting errors, time-consuming multiple data entry and redundancy.

One answer to this persistent problem is SIF, the Schools Interoperability Framework. SIF was conceived in the late 1990s to address issues of data integrity.  It was developed to allow data sharing between software applications in the K-12 environment.

Now, consider the School District of Holmen in Wisconsin. There, the transportation department receives a SIF update every five minutes from the district’s student information system.

“SIF is really valuable for us in terms of new students,” said Roger Saxton, the district’s  transportation supervisor.

With a total enrollment of 3,400 students, the district has grown by approximately 700 students in the last 7 years and expects to grow to 5,000 total students within 10 years. The district operates 38 yellow buses. Between June and September of last year, 150 new students registered in Holmen, excluding kindergartners the district already expected.

“Over the summer is where we find SIF incredibly valuable,” Saxton said.

“As soon as a new student is registered (at the) district central office, parents get on the phone to the transportation office and ask where the school bus stop is and when their child will be picked up,” he added. “We have the student information in five minutes, that’s how fast it comes to us. I can update our routing software immediately and see where the new student’s bus stop will be. With the information right in front of us, SIF allows us to give much better customer service to parents.”

What Exactly is SIF?
In its simplest form, SIF is a standard, set of data specifications that enables disparate software applications and operating systems to share data seamlessly. School districts typically have 10 to 15 applications that share some common pupil data. By itself, SIF is neither a product nor a software application.

The association’s Web site defines SIF as “... a set of rules and definitions which enable software programs from different companies to share information. This set of platform-independent, vendor-neutral rules and definitions is called the SIF Implementation Specification.  The SIF Specification makes it possible for programs within a school or district to share data without any additional programming and without requiring each vendor to learn and support the intricacies of other vendors’ applications.”

The SIF Implementation Specification is based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) endorsed Extensible Markup Language (XML) which is not linked to a specific operating system or platform.

“We are a community made up of school districts, regional service agencies, education departments, national entities and vendors who agree on a set of rules for data to be identified and moved between applications such as bus transportation, food service, student information systems, library services, etc. that exist in schools,” said Larry Furth, Ph.D., executive director of the Schools Interoperability Framework Association. “What SIF does is allow you to set the rules so you know that when you put a name into the student information system it automatically populates the transportation system.”

Added Laurie Collins, a SIF project strategist, “Before SIF we relied on phone calls from the secretary, or a call into the transportation system to get information. We typically tied up transportation, the school information system and cafeteria, in an effort to have timely data. It was very time consuming.”

SIF is geared to the primary and secondary school market in the U.S.

No Child Left Behind
Acceptance of SIF accelerated with passage of the No Child Left Behind Act and its mandate to collect and document student achievement statistics. As educators and transporters know, NCLB dramatically increased accountability, the demand for high quality education data, and reporting requirements to state and federal entities.

Legislators in Wyoming and Virginia have adopted SIF into state law. At least 43 states have implemented portions of SIF. More than 300 software vendors, school districts, state departments of education and other organizations are working on SIF compliance.

Significantly, “There are more than 5 million K-12 students under some SIF compliance,” said Furth.

It is unknown how many of these 5 million students attend schools with SIF compliant transportation software. Doug Hamlin of VersaTrans Solutions, one of five routing and scheduling software vendors offering SIF certified software, reports his company has sold 120 licenses for the VersaTrans SIF agent “and 50 of these are fully functional.” Hamlin expects an additional 50 school clients to come on stream soon.  Hamlin is on the SIF board of directors and is a former co-chair of the association.

In addition to VersaTrans Solutions, four other companies that provide routing and scheduling software offer SIF certification, including Education Logistics, Orbit Software, The Trapeze Group and Visual Software, a Web-based routing software supplier.

The SIF-compliant Trapeze suite of transportation products, for instance, includes Mapnet 4.0 or higher and all versions of both Smartr9 and VEO Suite.  Edulog has developed a SIF Subscription Agent, which gathers information from a district’s Student Information System and then populates Edulog’s routing and scheduling application. Orbit’s Bus Boss routing and scheduling software is SIF compliant and has “a couple of users,” said George Mastros, vice president of the company.

The SIF Agent
At the heart of SIF compliance is the SIF agent.  SIF agents are the liaison between a software application such as routing and scheduling, and a server which routes messages to other applications in a form the other applications understand. Think of a SIF agent as a police officer directing traffic.

Although SIF is an open-source initiative, vendors are only allowed to deploy their specification after rigid testing by SIF.  The testing is designed to ensure adherence to the technology standard and to demonstrate the new SIF agent can share data with other SIF-certified programs.

Now, a decade after it was first announced, SIF appears to be emerging as the linchpin of data management, quality and consistency at the local level, and, in turn, how state and federal governments allocate money and expect data to be managed.

“What we have said in regard to technology planning is that interoperability of data is critical to creating that foundation for student management and for testing progress,” said Timothy Magers, director of the office of technology with the U.S. Department of Education.

“We encourage people to look at interoperability,” he added. “There is recognition that this is a critical piece of gaining efficiency but also of gaining quality data. Without quality data you can’t manage well, and, as a consequence, what you report isn’t necessarily what you are managing. We have a vested interest in encouraging data quality at the local level so that, as it moves through the state level to the federal level, those numbers reflect reality,” said Magers.

He added, “Interoperability, and the efficiencies you get from it along with the lack of redundancies, but more importantly the whole notion of qualitative sourcing, becomes a key part of how we encourage schools and districts to look at the infrastructure they put in place to manage students.”

Gayle Morgan, routing coordinator for the Issaquah School District about 15 miles east of Seattle, said her district’s SIF project “saves me five to six hours a week vs. the manual downloading I used to have to do. I love it! Within half an hour of a secretary entering information in the district’s student data program we have it here in transportation.” Issaquah serves about 16,000 students and operates about 140 buses.  The district utilizes VersaTrans routing and scheduling software.

Meanwhile, at the Effingham County School District in Georgia, network administrator Holly Lewis echoes Morgan’s experience.

“When new students enroll in our district, we receive and import that information within 30 minutes.”  Effingham went from a pin-and-wall map system to VersaTrans routing and scheduling last summer. The district adopted SIF at the same time. Effingham serves about 10,000 students and operates about 100 buses.

Morgan said the district is exploring an “e-link function to allow newbies coming into the county, or realtors, to look up addresses and see the school district boundaries’ and bus routes.”

Both Issaquah and Effingham are also working with SIF vendors for library and food service.

A measure of how important interoperability is viewed can be gleaned from the Web-based service SIF recently developed.  The online service accommodates school systems that have not fully adopted the new standard.  It provides access to data via the report generation capabilities of the service implementation itself.  State agencies, school districts and other entities now have an industry standard method for retrieving report data from SIF Zones without knowledge of the internal details of–or the need to participate directly in the day-to-day operations of–given SIF Zones.

SIF is not simply a method to track data and save money, however.  It can generate revenues too.

The student population of Western Heights Schools in Oklahoma City stands at about 3,200 pupils, with nearly three-quarters to them eligible for free or reduced-price meals. Because the district was able to provide more accurate tracking of eligible students it boosted enrollment in the federal school lunch program 25- to 40 percent district wide.  As a consequence, district officials report, Western Heights Schools receives $750,000 in additional funding each year. 

Reprinted from the May 2007 issue of School Transportation News magazine. All rights reserved.