Memphis-Shelby County Schools drive educational excellence with Microsoft Power Platform

“One of the interesting things about evolving technology, specifically in K-12, is how diverse the challenges we as educators and administrators face, year over year,” says Keenan Sloan, Director of Strategic Programming and Innovation for Memphis-Shelby County Schools. “We can often identify our pain points, but unless you’re highly technically literate, and aware of a technology that addresses the issue, it can be hard to know what to ask for.”

The district is already using Microsoft Power BI to surface insights from myriad data sources, but data entry and collection for many vital and specific programs can be both cumbersome and laborious. “I remember when I first started five years ago wishing that when I submitted a form I could just make it auto-populate the relevant spreadsheet and then feed the spreadsheet into Power BI,” says Sloan. “That’s when I discovered Power Automate.” Sloan reached out to Microsoft to learn more about Power Automate and Power Platform as a whole.

“Often, we need a solution to be delivered right away,” continues Sloan. “With Power Platform, we can build low-code or no code applications that rapidly address specific needs and make sense to our end users. Even more important, these tools can feed data directly into Power BI, allowing for insights at both the team and enterprise level.”

Powerful results 

The first app Sloan and his colleagues Julia Shaffer and Laura Tippit built was a coaching toolkit to provide caseload management and streamlined support for school leaders. Since then, they have developed tools to address over twenty unique business cases.

Among these is Memphis-Shelby’s new behavior intervention system for the district’s 550 school counselors, behavior specialists, and other roles who support social and emotional learning. The app is model-driven and built with Microsoft Dataverse, which lets users store data in tables and securely manage that data for use in their applications.

“None of us have a background in database engineering or data management,” says Sloan. “We’ve learned to do this completely from scratch, with the help of the Power Apps community.” These are the first apps built by citizen developers outside the IT department at MSCS.

Laura Tippit (Left), Keenan Sloan (Center), Julia Shaffer (Right). The Strategic Programming and Innovation team at Memphis-Shelby County Schools have transformed data gathering and reporting across the district.

For the student behavior intervention app, the district reports it not only fits the needs of its counselors better than the legacy solution it replaced, but that it also generated operational savings of $300,000. The app is now deployed in every school in the district. “With Power Apps, we deployed our behavior intervention system for pennies on the dollar compared to both our old system and every bid that we received to replace it,” says Dr. Sherenda Moss, School Counseling Manager (K-8) at Memphis-Shelby County Schools. “Not only does it allow us to create records securely, but it also provides unprecedented access to our data compared to our expensive legacy system.”

Encouraged by the success of early development projects, Sloan and his team have expanded the utility of Power Platform by exploring how other employee groups could make use of similar tools for business cases like instructional coaching, state level assessment provisioning, remote teacher onboarding, and a variety of operational tools to support Program and Portfolio Management for projects in MSCS. For each app, it allows the team to link outputs to other services the district has since developed through Power Automate. This helps MSCS easily track team outputs and ROI at both the district and school level.

Both Sloan and MSCS also appreciate the layered, granular, role-based security that Power Platform offers. “We’re able to use sensitive student data in the system because Dataverse is built on Azure SQL and is HIPAA compliant by default,” says Sloan. “That, plus the multifactor authentication that central IT maintains on our tenant, gives our stakeholders peace of mind.”

Meaningful change

The three people that make up Sloan’s team are tasked with identifying and addressing the problems of practice across MSCS, and as such they have begun to function as a hub of collaborative problem solving. Whenever the team determines that a problem can be solved through process automation or with a low-code app, they can quickly and simply deliver a solution via Power Platform. “With Power Platform, my team and I understand the technology and what we can do with it,” says Sloan. “We already knew we loved Power BI. Dataverse is a game changer, and Power Apps is the star of the show.”

One of the biggest success stories for Sloan’s team is the launch of a new compliance portal for the district’s charter schools, with development led by Strategic Programming and Innovation Advisor Laura Tippit. “We used to create folders for each school, depending on unreliable naming conventions and hundreds of clicks to locate and verify compliance data,” explains Brittany Monda, Assistant Superintendent of Charter Schools at Memphis-Shelby County Schools. “With Power Apps and Power Pages, we now have an actual portal where schools can report their actions and monitor their own compliance status, while internal teams provide streamlined scoring.”

The app replaces the manual completion of multiple spreadsheets across fifty-four schools and twelve central office departments with elegantly automated data collection and scoring. Monda reports that the app saves her schools an average of 20 hours a week, at a fraction of the cost of a comparable service from a third-party vendor. “The time value this app generates per school is multiplicative,” she explains. “If the other 167 schools in the district joined our 54 charter schools in using it, we’d see another jump in efficiency.”

Ever-increasing value

MSCS plans to expand its use of Power Platform, eventually giving access to the key stakeholders in every central office team and school. Increasingly, district employees are familiar with the use and user experience of these apps within Power Apps, and automation through Power Automate. Increased Power Platform use is also reducing the number of disparate solutions the district pays for, while simultaneously reducing costs. “In education, people use a lot of varying technology,” says Sloan. “One of the biggest reasons we’ve leaned into Power Platform is that it can deliver sophisticated software tools with robust interoperability, while simultaneously replacing spreadsheets and unifying program data in a way that makes it much easier for ingesting and reporting.”

Sloan also emphasizes that, since MSCS is a Microsoft district, there should never be a need to re-procure any of the purpose-built apps and solutions his team is creating. Speaking about the coaching solution, he estimates that a low price for a custom third-party app would cost the district upwards of $40,000 a year. The coaching solution Sloan and his team built with Power Platform, in contrast, costs less than $3,000 a year in licenses for users that can then interact with any app developed by the team.

The solution is also providing something else new to the district: trackable ROI on multiple specialized projects. Because employees of all kinds can show the results of their work through their new apps, multiple programs can now share a precise view of their value to the district. Reduced manual reporting through automation also helps increase each team’s ROI. Sloan notes the enthusiasm from executive leadership especially in areas of finance and internal audit, who have noted that through these tools the district is beginning to systematize the core business of education. “This improves the district’s programmatic transparency and in the long run, responsiveness to stakeholders and even auditability by the state—a major win,” Sloan said.

“Keenan’s team is also able to deliver a high degree of customization, at a level of speed that we would have paid a lot more for with a third-party vendor,” says Dr. Sherenda Moss who, thanks to the work of Sloan’s team is also able to act as the behavior intervention application administrator for the MSCS Office of Student Equity, Enrollment and Discipline.

“It was amazing to have a team on our side of the business who could work directly with IT to ensure that we had custom admin capabilities built securely into the platform. Thanks to the collaboration between all these teams, we will also be able to expand the functions of the tool in the future at virtually no additional cost,” added Moss.

Sloan sees these solutions as having one other essential benefit: business resilience. “Power Platform solutions can help insulate a business from the impact of constant change,” he says. “The solutions are easy to customize, they’re easy to deploy, and they increase the emphasis on internal capacity building while decreasing spending and dependence on additional vendors.”