Case Study: Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools achieves improved data quality and higher graduation rates with SAS

SAS helps improve the educational experience for more than 54,000 students

Winston‑Salem/Forsyth County Schools (WS/FCS), a North Carolina district serving more than 54,000 students in 81 schools, faced fragmented student data across multiple systems and limited analytics staff. Administrators, principals and counselors needed fast, reliable reports to spot at‑risk students, plan interventions and allocate teaching resources — without reinventing the wheel each time data was needed.

WS/FCS implemented SAS (using SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Enterprise BI Server) to consolidate and validate 10 years of student data into an automated data warehouse and an Information Delivery Portal. The portal delivers iterative, up‑to‑date reports and weekly alerts so staff can intervene sooner, optimize teacher allotments from online course registrations, and monitor performance. As a result the district became far more data‑driven, improved early interventions, and raised its graduation rate from about 70% to 85.6% while gaining operational efficiencies and cost savings.

Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools

Debbie Harman

Director of Enterprise Data Systems