"As we begin the process of closing another school year I felt compelled to provide you with some insights we have experienced with Centre.

As a teacher for 12 years and a principal for six, I have had numerous opportunities to "learn" new and advanced ways of keeping current with student information systems. For over a decade our school used a very popular, but costly record keeping system. Scheduling was a nightmare, and we often just resorted back to the "paper trail." Our teachers had to keep the old fashioned grade books, figure grades, bubble scan-tron sheets, and hope everything worked. Our guidance office had to run scan-tron sheets for the teachers to complete, wait, scan the sheets, wait, and hope the process worked, which often did not. The system did not allow for midterm grades. Every quarter we literally typed individual schedules, sent them to the faculty, waited for grades, and finally mailed them. We could not check student progress without the process taking at least two full days. No transcript options, which was unbelievable. As for technical or any type of assistance, it was virtually non-existent, and when a problem occurred, we again had to wait. Needless to say, I grew weary of waiting, and we found Centre.

Centre completely changed our entire school community. Every aspect of educational record keeping was available immediately to our administrators, faculty, staff, students, and parents. The "paper trail" vanished. Beginning school was an easy task because the school calendar guided our setup process. With Centre, student information was instant, scheduling was a simple task, grade books were replaced with the on-line electronic options, midterm grade and report card grades printed without the slightest interruption, and none of these processes caused any of us to work extra hours. Our teachers are ecstatic about the electronic grade books and grading options. Completing grade reporting is as simple as a mouse click. Parents and students are thrilled that they can log-in and view "every" assignment, description, and grade. Even our athletic director is happy because the teachers have taken ownership of eligibility for our student athletes.

Lead Developer Matt Boytim has released Centre 2.14. Centre 2.14 has over 40 enhancements and bugfixes to enhance our capabilities and stability.

Here's what's new in Centre 2.14:

• Food Service Module
  • The Centre component of Food Service is included with the free distribution
  • The Point Of Sale program (Kiosk) remains commercial, though. An evaluation version of Kiosk will be available for download.
• Added color field to gradebook assignment categories for color coding the gradebook
• A new assignments interface is available
  • Automatically added for users of the old interface during upgrade
• Moved the color coding for report card comment categories from config.inc.php to the database
  • Configured on categories setup screen

For a complete list of changes and bugfixes, please see the "changes-2.14.txt" file in the Centre folder.

We're pleased to introduce Chris Danik, our new Documentation Contributor.

Chris is a web-hosting manager for a new web host company who resides in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, USA. Chris provides computer support through his own company and is learning PHP and SQL quite rapidly. He is a frequent contributor to many open-source sofware projects.

We're excited that Chris has joined the Centre development team. He is an enthusiastic contributor who follows-up on this contributions in a VERY timely manner and does great work. Just about perfect!

You can find him in our forums as "cdanik" and he's also the poster formally known as 'gigamich"

Chris has written all new documentation that will accompany our next release, Centre 2.14.

For a sample of his new "Quick Guides", please navigate to the Download section, and see the new Documentation and Quick Guide download library. Chris has added three Quick Guides -- "Block Scheduling", "Mailing Labels and Mail Merges", and "Grades and Assignments".

Less than a month from our last major release, Lead Developer Matt Boytim has released Centre v2.13. This version has several new enhancements, as requested by our users, that improve Student Demographics, User Interface, Gradebook, and Reporting.

For a complete list of changes and bugfixes in Centre v 2.13, please see "Changes-2.13.txt" included in your dowload folder.

• Editable items are dashed-underlined when using hidden fields

• New type for student, address, contact, and user fields
  Similar to Pull-Down type but exported value is specified which is used when saving the list (nice for reports where a coded value is required for the report but a verbose value is desired in the stored data. This is the dual of the Coded Pull-Down type.)
  Select options are specified like the Coded Pull-Down type
  value1|code1
  value2|code2
  ...
  where value is stored/displayed and code exported (but there is preferences option for which is exported) (note: Coded Pull-Downs are specified
  code1:value1
  code2|value2
  ... where code is stored/exported and value displayed (but there is preferences option for which is exported) )

• Teachers can suppress letter grades for all assignments or for assignments below a minimum point value

• Teachers can view user information for parents associated with students

• Better support for contacts without addresses

• More items
• Additional criteria for addresses and contacts

• Additional configuration options in modules/Grades/config.inc.php

• Relabeled to 'Centre ID' to avoid confusion with other ID's

New School Year bring new improvements! Lead Developer Matt Boytim has been listening to our users and has brought out a new version loaded with user-requested improvements and fixes.

• Added student name format options

• Disabled nurse visit records for parents/students so parents can have access to other medical info but keep visit records confidential.

• Added sort order to attendance categories
• Changed attendance categories setup to view/edit categories on the 'new' (+) tab
• Added attendance completed feature for user defined attendance categories
• Attendance in courses setup can be enable for each attendance category
• Other attendance categories added to portal alerts
• Added office comments to TakeAttendance so teachers can view office comments

• Added default to enrollment codes for rollover
• Added sort order to enrollment codes

• Made school information saved for each year so school info can be updated each year
• Added school_number so can be included in student reports

• Added StudentGrades to admin Grades menu

• Added option to export Coded Pull-Down types as un-decoded value
• Added option for exported date format

• Added name_suffix for users

We thought it was perfect, but Lead Developer Matt Boytim has come up with enhancements to Users and bugfixes worthy of a new release. We're making the User support more and more like the support for Students, including "Back to User Search" and "Back to User List" links at the bottom of the screen. We're also adding consistency and stability to Users.

The bugfixes were only minor, and the changes in 2.11.1 are as follows:

• spelling correction in modules/Grades/Configuration.php
• resturctured HonorRoll.php to use a 'local widget'
• bugfix: change several Widgets('mailing_labels',true) to Widgets('mailing_labels') missed in 2.11
• bugfix: student field search criteria listed twice in expanded view
• added 'back to user list' and 'back to user search' buttons in lower frame
• continued to restructure user seraches to be more like student searches
• restricted search on Users/Permissions to users with custom permissions via the profile search widget
• converted Students/Letters.php (Print Letters) to search/select style
• added PrintLetters to teacher menu
• added list of available substitutions to Print Letters
• bugfix: user preferred widgets not properly included on search screen
• bugfix: course period sticky when changing teacher selection in TeacherPrograms

Lead Developer Matt Boytim has released v. 2.11 of Centre, the premier open source student information system. This is a release with substantial improvements and fixes and is recommended for all users.

Matt continues his pattern of improving Centre's reliability yet extending the functionality with ideas from Centre Users. We've gotten some great suggestions from our supported users and we've implemented lots of them in this release. Thanks to Joe, Peter, James, Brian, Gloria, Mike and others for their help and ideas!

New features for 2.11 are:

• Honor Roll
• Report Card Comment Categories - more standards-based grading
• Advanced Search feature for more granular queries
• Explicit School Selection for teachers, improving multiple school performance
• Improved and extended Searching Widgets for more power
• User Fields in Expanded view

Centre is pleased to announce its partnership with Open Solutions for Education (http://os4ed.com). OS4ED is an organization dedicated to the development and distribution of quality open source solutions for K-12 education. OS4ED solutions are focused on collection, tracking, measuring and analyzing of data in support of student achievement. OS4ED is working to provide real open source alternatives to commercial products resulting in lower cost of ownership. Together, OS4ED and Centre will continue to design and deliver quality open source applications for K-12 education.

• Centre Student Information System - A complete web-based SIS built on freely available and well supported open source technologies.
• openIntel Education Data Warehouse - A first release education data warehouse focusing on the areas of Students and Achievement. The solution is built on freely available and well supported open source technologies.

• openAssess - A solution to help schools create items and generate tests for formative assessments.
• openSIF - An open source SIF solution

Centre Version 4.0 with an entirely new navigation and look will be released through OS4ED in Fall 2007. Please visit http://os4ed.com for more information.

The Banks County School System seeks to provide a challenging academic curriculum that prepares every student for a productive life. In partnership with parents and the greater community, we aspire to foster in every student a desire for lifelong learning, a commitment to personal fitness, an appreciation of the arts, a deep-rooted understanding of right and wrong, and a desire to participate responsibly in a free and democratic society.

The Banks County School System is embraced by a progressive community that supports a quality education for all students. The community has shown support with the passage of three Educational Local Option Sales Taxes (ELOST). This funding has resulted in the completion of a new high school, stadium, field house, state of the art middle school and elementary school, additions to the primary school, and new bus maintenance facility.

Currently, the technology staff includes a Director, Instructional Specialist, and two technicians. Every classroom has 3 to 5 desktops connected to the internet for a total of approximately 1500 nodes.

This is the first year that we have started to virtual servers as a method of reducing hardware maintenance and maximizing our return on our investment.

According to VMWare, Inc. "Virtualization is an abstraction layer that decouples the physical hardware from the operating system to deliver greater IT resource utilization and flexibility.

Virtualization allows multiple virtual machines, with heterogeneous operating systems to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded. The operating system sees a consistent, normalized set of hardware regardless of the actual physical hardware components."

• Reduced Electric Cost
• Reduced Cooling Cost
• Increased Battery Backup Run Time
• Regained Rack Space
• Simplified Backkup and Disaster Recovery

• SuperMicro 4U Rackmount Server
• Dual Dual Core Processor, AMD Opteron
• 8GB DDR2 SDRAM
• 8 SATA HDD (RAID 10), Hardware RAID
• 10/100/1000 Ethernet
• Windows 2003 Server Standard
• VMWare Server (Free Edition)