This summer I worked for The American Academy (TAA), a start-up company in Salt Lake City. TAA offers alternative online high school for at-risk and dropout students, partnering with school districts across the nation to help students achieve their high school diplomas. Since 2009, TAA has increased the number of school districts it has partnered with by 10x, and has plans for rapid growth over the next few years.

TAA uses a database of 15,000 school districts in order to develop a marketing strategy as well as derive district specific information on revenues, enrollment, and per-pupil funding. However, this database is very user unfriendly and difficult to navigate, and TAA salespeople ultimately haven’t been using it. In order to help the salespeople use this information, I created a series of sub procedures and user forms that make this information much more accessible and useable.

My project has two parts. First, I created a user form that allows the user to search for specific school districts and extract pertinent information about that school district. Second, the user can specify criteria such as state/county, enrollment, and per-pupil funding levels, and create a report that will sort out all school districts that meet the criteria. These tools save the salespeople time and provide a way for them to better identify school districts to work with.

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10f/saxmansb/Spencer_Bush_Write-Up.pdf

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10f/saxmansb/School_District_Database_Navigator.xlsm