1. Clear Creek Independent School District implemented Naviance Course Planner to help students create electronic course plans and select electives online, replacing outdated paper-based planning. 2. Using Naviance, over 12,000 course plans were created and Clear Creek saw savings of nearly $87,000. 3. Naviance helped Clear Creek meet new state requirements for student course tracking and allowed students to easily access and update their course plans from any location.

1. Case Study
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Clear Creek ISD
“ Naviance has made a tremendous
impact in our ability to communicate with
students and parents about the importance
of pursuing a higher education.”
– SUZIE THOMAS, Director of Student Personnel Services
Clear Creek ISD
CLEAR CREEK ISD
2013 QUICK FACTS
12,264 Course Plans Created
2827 Resumes Created
5120 Career Assessments Completed
2,046 Personality Assessments
Completed
$86,993 in savings using Naviance eDocs
(‘12-’13)
(As of March 2013 for ‘12-’13 Academic Year)
The Challenge
Many schools have used the same manual process for course planning
for more than 30 years. When the state of Texas issued new course
requirements for its students in 2006, known as the “4x4” graduation
requirements, one district decided to try something new.
The Texas “4x4” graduation requirements necessitate that every student
earn at least one credit in each of the four core subjects (Language Arts,
Math, Science and Social Studies) during each of their four years in high
school. As a result, schools will need to establish a plan of action and
implement a comprehensive system to track student participation in
courses, particularly Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses. By
doing so successfully, districts will have the opportunity to qualify for
additional state funding.
Clear Creek Independent School District, the 29th largest school
district in Texas, with more than 39,000 students across 43 schools, was
determined to meet the new requirements while upholding their
reputation in the state. In 2010, Clear Creek ISD received the Texas
Education Agency’s (TEA) highest ranking of “exemplary,”, a ranking
that only 29% of Texas school districts received. The following year,
approximately 95% of the students in the district passed The Texas
Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), and 97.1% of the
district’s high school students graduated. Clear Creek ISD attributes its
accomplishments to the hard work and diligence of educators. However,
despite their progress and achievements, meeting new state standards
was increasingly difficult due to the manual processes in place at the
district.
Suzie Thomas, Director of Student Personnel Services, has seen many
variations of these manual processes since she began working at Clear
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2. Case Study
hobsons.com To learn more or to schedule a demo, call 800.927.8439 (toll-free) or +1.703.859.7300 (international).
Clear Creek ISD
Creek ISD. For years, counselors relied on paper course plans
to help students track their courses - paper course plans were
especially challenging since they were not easily updated and
not readily accessible to students and families. In addition,
elective courses did not effectively translate to paper forms: “The
counselors were all rather quite comfortable to say ‘here are
all your English, Math, Science, and Social Studies, your
ForeignLanguagerequirements,’butthenatthebottom,youhave
‘elective, elective, elective,’ and they didn’t spell out what those
electives were.” said Mrs. Thomas.
Clear Creek ISD also tracked and reported CTE courses and
coding by hand, which was labor intensive, inefficient, and
time consuming. For example, each school in the district
would survey its students to see what CTE courses were being
taken and what courses students planned on taking. The
schools would compare the results to the actual CTE sequence
each student had started or was enrolled in. After matching
each student’s CTE result and sequence, school staff would then
determine the appropriate code and manually key in all the data
for reporting purposes.
The Solution
Clear Creek ISD did not want to simply improve their manual
processes and streamline operations. They wanted to improve
in ways that would directly impact their students. Their plan
of action had one objective: to help students plan for success
beyond high school and provide course planning resources that
are accessible to students and their families. The district
determined that it could meet each of those goals with Naviance
Course Planner to move from paper to electronic course plans.
Clear Creek ISD had set an ambitious goal of having 100%
of 13,000 high school students complete an electronic course
plan. Initial reports pulled by Mrs. Thomas indicated that
many schools were well below the expectation. She decided to
provide transparency into the progress of each school through
completion reports generated from Naviance and scheduled
meetings with each school’s principal to address district-wide
completion rates. She found that competition and accountabil-
ity were enough to incentivize school’s to take ownership of the
100% mark. The district has continued to achieve success with
course plan completion as each year goes by. Mrs. Thomas has
also made it easier for students to use Naviance Course Planner
and understand what courses are right for them.
The Results
Before implementing Naviance Course Planner, students were
often unclear of what general and CTE courses they should
take and in what order they should take them. With Naviance
Course Planner, students are able to see all of the courses
available in one place while at school or at home. Naviance
Course Planner also makes it easy for Mrs. Thomas to tweak
the course titles and layout of the courses to make the student
experience even smoother. Instead of sorting the courses by
name, they are sorted by number, which guides the students
through the course selection and the district’s pre-requisite
system. CTE courses are grouped by cluster, easing the process
by which students find the correct cluster and CTE courses
for their course plan. By spending the time to make the course
selection process as user-friendly as possible, Clear Creek ISD
has helped students stay on track and has more accurate
statistics, data, and insight into course selection for future
planning.
The Next Chapter
Clear Creek ISD continues to move the ball forward with its
course planning evolution. While the district has met its goal
of 100% course plan completion for all students, the district
has some additional goals to accomplish. The next project the
district plans to tackle is improving the course registration
process.
Every February, the district puts on a course fair and publishes
an updated course catalog. Students and families are given the
opportunity to revisit and review the student’s course selection
for the upcoming year. The review process tends to delay the
finalization and entry of the student course selection into the
district’s course scheduler. The delay, combined with the manual
effort needed to input students’ course selections, led to the need
to develop a more efficient course registration process.
Once Clear Creek ISD was able to export completed course
plans from Naviance Course Planner and import them into
their course scheduler, registration became a simple task. In
February, rather than using the time-intensive process of
manually entering each student’s course selection, the district
uploaded all course selections with the press of a button.