About SWIS

The School-Wide Information System (SWIS) is a web-based software system for collecting and summarizing office discipline referrals in schools. The system was developed by University of Oregon faculty in collaboration with elementary, middle (junior high) and high school personnel. The purpose of SWIS is to provide schools with accurate, efficient, practical information for decision-making about school-wide discipline.

SWIS was developed to be an efficient, reliable and confidential strategy for managing office-discipline referral information. SWIS can be used for:

1. Internal decision making as schools improve their discipline practices.
2. Support plan design with individual students and their families.
3. Reporting to district, state and federal agencies about school outcomes.
4. As a method of collecting aggregated data across schools.

SWIS database is housed on a secure and dedicated server at the University of Oregon, and is managed by system administrators employed by the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports Technical Assistance Center projects at the University.

Once a SWIS account is set up, the school staff enters office discipline referrals into a protected, web-space. The data may be summarized to provide information about individual students, groups of students, or the entire student body over any specified time period. Both numerical printouts, and graphs (histograms) are created for use in decision-making. While SWIS is flexible and can be adapted to the needs of individual schools, the major uses involve monitoring:

1. The number of office discipline referrals per month.
2. The type of problem behaviors leading to office referrals.
3. The locations of problem behavior events.
4. The problem behavior events by time of day.
5. The students contributing to office discipline referrals.

The system uses a menu-based data entry process that makes data entry and report generation easy and efficient.

SWIS is an information system. That means it is designed to collect and summarize information that is used for decision-making. The heart of SWIS is the web-based computer application that allows easy collection, summary and storage of office referral data. However, schools using SWIS have also developed the internal skills, and allocated the faculty and staff time to use the information on a regular basis for making behavior support decisions about both individual children and school-wide discipline systems. SWIS is more than a computer application. It is a system for improving school-wide behavior support. The time allocated for team meetings, data summary and decision making are as, if not more, important to the success of SWIS than the computer application.

SWIS features include:

• Easy control over staff and student information.
• Data entry for students who are involved in problem behavior events.
• Student and staff information is entered one time and available for future use.
• Simple data entry (approximately 30 sec. per referral).
• Comprehensive and standardized referral form for problem analysis.
• Easy accuracy checks for data entry.
• Report options that include graphs and tables for a specified period of time.
• Options to print individual student and staff names on reports.
• Creatable custom reports and graphs to answer specific questions.
• Multiple security levels.
• Easy navigation.

Adapted from www.swis.org

SWIS Resources

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Compatability Checklist

SWIS Readiness Checklist

ODR Definitions

Training Material Checklist