DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A SCHOOL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

1.1 Introduction

The Online School Management System will aid school proprietors, teachers, bursar and general administrative arm of schools to effectively manage students and other stakeholders of the school. One of the benefits of automated School Management System is that the student record system will simplify retrieval of required information and is a great instrument for school improvement by taking measures from the information acquired (Cooper et al 1996). Despite the use of automated SMS, the government schools in Nigeria are using paper based documentation system for performing various tasks and the school administrators apply their knowledge of hit and miss approach in scheduling classes and courses (preparing the timetable) which wastes manpower and much time unnecessarily that does not utilize the current technology.

As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.

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1.2 Background of Study

Education system forms the backbone of every nation. And hence it is important to provide a strong educational foundation to the young generation to ensure the development of open-minded global citizens securing the future for everyone. Advanced technology available today can play a crucial role in streamlining education-related processes to promote solidarity among students, teachers, parents and the school staff.

Education is central to development. It is one of the most powerful instruments for reducing poverty and inequality and lays a foundation for sustained economic growth. With this aim currently our government has given special emphasis to the educational sector and school improvement activities such as continuous professional development for teachers, training and upgrading teachers and capacitating schools with manpower and materials are among the major actions which have been taken in both primary and secondary schools. In order to facilitate and simplify these actions one of the major tool is to have automated school management system.

School Management System(SMS) consists of tasks such as registering students, attendance record keeping to control absentees, producing report cards, producing official transcript, preparing timetable and producing different reports for teachers, parents, officials from kebele or kefle ketema education bureaus and other stakeholders.

Automation is the utilization of technology to replace human with a machine that can perform more quickly and more continuously. By automating SMS documents that took up many large storage rooms can be stored on few disks. Transcript images can be annotated. It reduces the time to retrieve old transcripts from hours to seconds. However, the school system in the government schools of Addis Ababa is not automated and the record officers generate transcripts and reports manually and the school administrators use their experienced knowledge of miss and hit approaches to prepare timetables.

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1.3 Statement of the Problem

Investigation revealed that despite the use of automated SMS, the government schools in Addis Ababa are using paper based documentation system for performing various tasks and the school administrators apply their knowledge of hit and miss approach in scheduling classes and courses (preparing the timetable) which wastes manpower and much time unnecessarily that does not utilize the current technology.

Transcripts of students are prepared manually by the record officer and teachers. Report cards are produced by the home-room teachers. Attendance of students is recorded by the home-room teachers. In order to control absentees and know the number of days that a student has been absent from the school during the school days the attendance officer has to collect the attendance slips from the corresponding homeroom teachers and compile it which is also a time taking process.

In addition to that retrieving records of students who have graduated couple of years ago has been a difficult task and the manual system also has difficulty of producing different reports which are required by the stakeholders such as teachers, administrators or officials from kebele and kifle-ketema.

Teachers may want to associate a student with his parent or emergency persons for disciplinary measures which need searching of the students record in the record office. It has been difficult to search a record from thousands of such records and observed that students can take any person claiming that he/she is their parent or emergency person which creates problem in control of students.

Due to the inefficiency of the current manual system, the need arises to automate SMS in order to efficiently handle students' attendance, to produce transcript, report cards and the various reports satisfying users and customers and to produce timetable which can schedule courses for teachers and classes of students.

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1.4 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of the study is to design and implement an Online School Management System using Divine Concept International School as a case study. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows to develop an application software that will:

1. Provide a secured school management system for registration and admission of students.
2. Keep track of student information such as school fees and results.
3. Be user friendly for school proprietors to effectively manage resources of the school.
4. Facilitate attendance record keeping and various report generation and
5. Allow teachers, parents, school community and Education bureau officials to view reports on students.

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1.5 Significance of Study

The use of School Management System has the significance effect and this can be enumerated as follows:

1. To help the school to know the pedigree of all the student admitted into the school.
2. To create a storage of large volume of data on school records.
3. To assist the school management for easily identification of students.
4. To prevents students to involve themselves any havoc happening in the school because of the fear tracking them.

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1.6 Scope of Study

This project is aimed at how the institute can improve the efficiency of the services. School Management System is one the application involves almost all the features of the information system. The futures implementation will be online help for users to obtain information.

The study focused on the development of a web based system that allows secure online fees payment. The system will be used by students and their sponsors to pay all kinds of university fees online, and by university accounts offices to verify students’ payments. The system captures financial information after payments are made.

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1.7 Limitations of the Study

During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:

1. Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
2. Establishment Policies: Establishment policies posed a serious limitation as most staffs are not ready to release information needed for this project work. There were lots of information needed from the staffs of this institution to enhance the study which took them time to release or they did not release at all for security purposes, hence the scope was reduced.
3. Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
4. Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
5. Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).

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1.8 Definition of Terms

School Management System: An information system for managing students and teachers resources in a school.

Tracking System: It is used for the observing of persons or objects on the more and supplying a timely ordered sequence of respective location data to a model e.g. capable to serve for depicting the motion on a display capability.

Student: A person studying at a university other place of higher education.

Student Information: Is a student-level data collection system that allows the department to collect and analyze more accurate and comprehensive information.