Entrepreneurs in Public Education?

By Johnny Arguelles

Some of you may or may not have heard of CEDR Systems, and if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard of some of the applications developed by CEDR Systems. CEDR Systems is a programming department out of the San Joaquin County Office of Education (SJCOE), established in 2001 to collaborate with 50-plus departments and programs at the SJCOE to improve the access, redundancy and reporting of critical program data. This collaboration was the inception of many innovative and effective web, software and mobile applications used in nearly every school district in California today.

  A few of these applications include:

• EDJOIN, which averages more than 10 million hits per week in traffic and has over four terabytes in data. EDJOIN has also recently gone national and is used by more than 4,000 school districts and 2.5 million job applicants across the U.S., and was the recipient of the National 2012 Brian L. Talbott Award from the Association of Educational Service Agencies. 

• SEIS, which is California’s most widely used Special Education IEP and state reporting system used in more than 900 California school districts and supporting some 75,000 teachers and 700,000 special education students. SEIS has helped set standardization on IEP forms, goal writing (over 10,000 goals and objectives in SEIS), and transferability (over 3.5 million electronic student record transfers between districts within SEIS) among others.

• PROMIS, a student information system built exclusively for county programs to address unique challenges and student population related to alternative education (court, community and juvenile hall), ROP, adult education and special education. PROMIS provides attendance accounting (for a highly transient student population), CALPADS reporting and validation, grading, and iPad app for attendance and grading and much more. PROMIS is used in 16 counties with more committing the beginning of the 2013-2014 fiscal year.

• California Department of Education (CDE), CEDR has several contracts with the CDE for systems such as the Physical Fitness Test (PFT) data collection and reporting system; the School Accountability Report Card (SARC); and an online dynamic SARC generator and mobile app (scheduled to be released next year); California Career Resource Network (CalCRN) website, database, iPhone app, iPad app and Android app; the AB 430 for Administrator Training online system; and, the AB 1433 for Oral Health Assessment Reporting system among others.

New products and services we will offer for 2013-2014 include SST Online, an online SST, 504, and referral management system; DocsManager, a full-scale records retention system with full-page ORC and online access; Service Tracking, an online module integrated with SEIS for tracking IEP service delivery progress and Medi-Cal billing data; and, the complete re-development and re-launch of the new EDJOIN 2.0.  Also, we just had a sold-out CEDR Northern California User Conference with 450 attendees and 12 vendors, and the Southern California conference is four months away and will be even bigger.  

We are mostly programmers, who happen to enjoy working in public education. Our passion is in learning and leveraging the latest programming technologies/languages and best practices in robust web, software and mobile development. We take pride in the quality of our code. Over the past decade our standards in application architecture, code design patterns, data-structure, data-models, team development methodologies/lifecycles, version control, quality assurance, product deployment, etc., have all evolved to the standards of many Fortune 500 companies. Seeing the applications we build actually help schools and students make what we do even more rewarding.

Since 2001, we have grown from three full-time employees to more than 30. We owe our success to our users and the feedback and direction they provide to make the applications we develop work better for them. We realized that the challenges we face and that our applications address, are similar in almost every county office and school district in the state. Therefore, offering our application to all California county offices and school districts not only improves the quality of the application through more feedback, it also promotes standardization and collaboration across the state.  As a County Office of Education we have a unique and privileged situation where our customers are also our colleagues, and with that I believe comes better service, support, collaboration and accountability. We just listen and respond to our users which results in innovative, efficient and effective web/software/mobile solutions, built by public education, for public education.  

We hope our success can help encourage other developers in public education to leverage their expertise to develop more innovative software for public education.  We also hope someday to see a network of developers from school districts and county offices across the state, communicating and learning from each other, to help keep our knowledge and skills ahead of the curve. 

 

About the Author:

Johnny Arguelles is the CEDR director at the San Joaquin County Office of Education. He can be reached at jarguelles@sjcoe.net.