Revolutionizing School Resource Collaboration: How NERIC and Mindex innovated cross-district course capacity sharing

We’re excited to share that our team recently authored a guest article for the AWS Business Intelligence Blog! The piece highlights how NERIC and Mindex are transforming how schools across New York State collaborate by reimagining cross-district course capacity sharing with Amazon QuickSight.

Below is a sneak preview—be sure to check out the full article on the AWS Blog.

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.

To learn more about how this solution came to life and the impact it's making, read the full article on the AWS Blog.

Read the Full AWS Article