This is a guest post written by Maggie Verrall, Jeffrey Luks, and John Hill of Mindex.
Educational institutions across New York State face a common challenge: efficiently connecting students with specialized courses that might not be available in their home districts. For years, guidance counselors have relied on manual processes—phone calls and emails—to find available seats in neighboring districts, a time-consuming process that limited educational opportunities for students.
In this post, we share how the Northeastern Regional Information Center (NERIC) partnered with Mindex to develop an innovative cross-district scheduling solution powered by Amazon QuickSight, enabling school districts to efficiently share course information and dramatically reduce the time needed to place students in courses across district boundaries.
The challenge: Connecting students with educational opportunities
NERIC serves over 130 school districts across 17 counties in New York State. As one of 12 Regional Information Centers (RICs) affiliated with the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), NERIC plays a vital role in enhancing instructional technology and managing student information systems throughout the region.
One persistent challenge faced by school districts, particularly smaller ones, was the inability to efficiently share scheduling data across district boundaries. Guidance counselors would spend significant time—up to 30 minutes per student—manually calling or emailing neighboring districts to determine course availability, checking bell schedules, and confirming seat availability one by one.
The process was incredibly inefficient. Counselors would have to make multiple calls to different districts, sometimes as many as eight, just to gather basic information about course availability. This was time that could have been better spent working directly with students.
The solution: Centralized course scheduling with QuickSight
NERIC was already using Mindex’s Advanced Analytics platform built on QuickSight with their SchoolTool Student Management System (SMS) districts. This existing relationship made QuickSight the natural choice for building a cross-district scheduling solution that would streamline the process of finding and securing course seats across district boundaries.
The project, which began in February 2024 and launched for testing in April 2024, created a centralized system similar to a college course catalog. This system allows counselors to filter courses based on various criteria, including subject, delivery method (virtual or in-person), and remaining seats.
The Course Scheduling dashboard (see the following screenshots) provides an immediate overview of course availability across districts and buildings. The dashboard displays availability based on open seats, department, and time of day, with intuitive filters that allow users to quickly narrow their focus to specific courses of interest.
Additional visualizations show course availability by building, displaying the number of available seats at each location. This helps identify which buildings have the most or least course availability, allowing for better resource allocation and decision-making across the region. The dashboards update automatically each night, but we can modify the refresh frequency during peak periods of increased activity.
The dashboard also includes a visualization showing the number of seats available by period start hour, helping counselors quickly identify courses that align with students’ existing schedules—a critical factor when coordinating across different district bell schedules.
Perhaps most valuable is the sortable course table that provides detailed information for each course, including course name, capacity, available seats, start and end times, department, building, district, teacher information, and delivery method. This comprehensive view gives counselors all the information they need in one place, eliminating the need for multiple phone calls and emails.
Solution overview
Implementing this solution required overcoming several technical challenges, particularly around data integration. The project needed to bring together data from three different sources:
- NERIC SchoolTool SMS districts
- Another region’s SchoolTool SMS districts (SCRIC, the South Central Regional Information Center)
- Data from several non-SchoolTool SMS districts
The complexity came from integrating data across multiple AWS accounts. Each RIC operates within its own AWS account, making cross-account data integration more involved.
The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.
The architecture uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for data storage, with Amazon Athena serving as the query engine to access and analyze the data. Athena enables SQL-based querying on structured data stored in Amazon S3, allowing QuickSight to retrieve insights efficiently without requiring a traditional database.
The architecture diagram shows two QuickSight instances because the data is stored in different AWS accounts for each RIC. Although users from different RICs might view the same shared data, they also need access to region-specific dashboards and information. By maintaining separate accounts, we can better control data access and make sure users only see the data relevant to their specific RIC or district.
For non-SchoolTool districts, we created a Transfer Family SFTP server where these districts can send exports following the structure of the other districts’ scheduling files, providing consistent data integration regardless of the source system.
Embedded analytics for a seamless user experience
The scheduling dashboard is embedded within Mindex Advanced Analytics, creating a seamless experience for users. When viewing a dashboard, it appears as an integrated part of the Mindex Advanced Analytics interface, not as a separate tool.
We implement QuickSight console embedding with user-based permissions to control both dashboard access and data visibility through row-level security (RLS) and column-level security (CLS). Although this particular dashboard doesn’t require RLS or CLS restrictions because it contains no personally identifiable information (PII), many of our other dashboards contain sensitive data. The user-based permission system has proven effective in managing access to this sensitive information.
Embedding was crucial for user adoption. We wanted the experience to feel cohesive and intuitive, not like users were jumping between different systems.
Users access QuickSight securely through embedded sessions, which provide a secure and seamless login process. With QuickSight APIs and its built-in user management, we provision new users in a just-in-time fashion and authenticate each session using Java Web Tokens (JWTs) from our central identity and access management service through API calls from the parent application. And although the scheduling dashboard doesn’t contain PII, Mindex’s broader Advanced Analytics dashboards use RLS and CLS to control (or authorize) access to sensitive student information.
Why QuickSight?
Several factors made QuickSight the ideal choice for this project:
- The AWS ecosystem integration was paramount, because Mindex’s other software-as-a-(SaaS) service offerings are built on AWS. This provided a smooth integration with other AWS services already in use.
- The serverless technology of QuickSight alleviated the need to manage infrastructure, allowing us to focus on building analytics rather than maintaining underlying systems.
- The ability to embed and brand the dashboards was crucial for creating a cohesive product experience, making the analytics feel like an integrated part of the solution rather than a separate tool.
- QuickSight offered an ease of use that aligned well with our customer base, who are often educational professionals rather than technical users.
- API-level integration capabilities enabled management of datasets, dashboards, and users at scale, automating processes that would have been difficult with other business intelligence (BI) tools.
- Continuous innovation in QuickSight, including investments in areas like generative AI, meant that the solution would remain at the forefront of technology advancements.
Measurable results: 500% faster student scheduling
The impact of the QuickSight powered scheduling solution has been dramatic. The most significant benefit has been the reduction in turnaround time for getting students scheduled in other districts—now five times faster than the previous manual process.
Before implementing the solution, counselors would spend an average of 30 minutes per student contacting multiple schools to gather necessary information. With QuickSight, users can access up-to-date data in a single dashboard in about 5 minutes, saving up to 25 minutes per student in counselor time and effort.
This 500% improvement in speed and efficiency has transformed the scheduling process, allowing counselors to dedicate more time to other students and increase the number of students able to take classes in other districts.
When you consider that this time savings applies to 1–3 administrators at each school district—professionals who are typically extremely time-constrained and wear many hats—the impact is substantial. We’re saving each school administrator up to 25 minutes per student, which adds up quickly across an entire district.
Another key benefit is the automatic data refreshes. The data is updated nightly, with the ability to adjust frequency during high-demand periods like January, when scheduling activity increases as counselors begin searching for classes for the second semester.
Looking ahead: Statewide expansion
The success of the initial implementation in Schoharie County has created momentum for broader adoption. Looking ahead, the solution could potentially expand to include up to 700 districts statewide, encompassing approximately 1.6 million students.
This expansion would allow students from different regions to access specialized courses that might not be available locally, including both virtual and in-person options depending on the proximity of participating schools.
The potential impact of this solution at scale is enormous. By removing the barriers to cross-district course sharing, we’re opening up educational opportunities that simply weren’t accessible before, particularly for students in smaller or rural districts that might not have the resources to offer specialized courses.
The following dashboard shows an example where a student wants to take American Sign Language (ASL), which is not offered at their local school. By using the scheduling dashboard, the counselor can see that ASL is offered at two neighboring schools, virtual or in-person, and what times the ASL class is offered, so they can immediately see what works with the student’s schedule.
Conclusion
Our collaboration between NERIC and Mindex demonstrates how QuickSight can transform educational processes through embedded analytics. By centralizing course availability data and providing intuitive visualizations, the solution has dramatically reduced the time required to place students in courses across district boundaries.
As the solution expands beyond Schoharie County to potentially serve hundreds of districts statewide, the impact on educational opportunities will continue to grow. This project showcases how AWS services can help educational institutions overcome complex data challenges and create more efficient, equitable systems that better serve students and educators alike.
The cross-district scheduling solution is just one example of how the embedded analytics capabilities of QuickSight can address real-world challenges in education. By continuing to innovate and expand these solutions, we’re helping create a future where administrative barriers no longer limit educational opportunities for students across New York State.
About the Authors
Maggie Verrall is an Associate BI Engineer at Mindex, where she specializes in building and maintaining customer-facing dashboards in Amazon QuickSight. She ensures these dashboards are continuously updated based on ongoing feedback and feature requests. In addition to her technical work, Maggie also provides training and support to users in school districts, helping them author their own dashboards in QuickSight. Jeffrey Luks is the Director of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development at Mindex. He joined Mindex in February 2024. Previously, he spent 11 years at Northeastern Regional Information Center (NERIC) as Manager of Student Services, where he oversaw multiple departments providing software and services to over 200 LEAs in the NERIC region. John Hill serves as the Cloud Data and Analytics Manager at Mindex, where he sets the strategic direction for the data and analytics practice and offers support and guidance to his team. He is involved in presales engineering to secure new business and oversees the technical aspects of all ongoing projects to ensure their success.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/business-intelligence/revolutionizing-school-resource-collaboration-how-neric-and-mindex-innovated-cross-district-course-capacity-sharing-with-amazon-quicksight/