Data Science Goes to School

Why does a school board need a data scientist? Allan Campopiano is a Research Analyst at Halton Catholic District School Board and, with the help of Anvil, has changed the way his school board uses data after showing the senior leadership what was possible. Allan’s research department covers 52 schools and over 30,000 students and analyses a staggering amount of data across a range of datasets. They provide reports so that superintendents and senior administrators can make can make evidence-based decisions, track metrics of student success and identify areas for improvement.

Al has built an impressive number of applications with Anvil. Among these are:

  • School Board Research Portal - a central hub used by the board to connect staff to resources offered by the research department.
  • Workflow Management for Mental Health Referrals - an application that creates, manages and visualises mental health referral applications.
  • Graphical Querying Tool for Exploring Student Data - a graphical query builder allowing staff to select student records that satisfy a particular pattern or criteria
  • School Visit Tracker - an app for tracking school visits. Uses role-based user authentication to display different information depending on which member of staff is logged in.
  • Interactive Student Attendance Viewer - a live and interactive view of consecutive and habitual absences for any school for which the user is granted access.
HCDSB Research Portal

HCDSB Research Portal

I built this attendance application. Once people saw [my] attendance app, basically the phone was ringing off the hook. People wanted web applications for everything!

Allan Campopiano

Research Analyst, HCDSB