Will Cernanec is a 2018–2019 enFocus Fellow. He has been working on a project with the South Bend School Corporation since early September. We visited his office in the Human Resources department to talk about his work on this project and experience with enFocus so far:
Tell us about the project you are working on with the South Bend Schools.
Mondays and Wednesdays I work in the South Bend Community School Corporation building downtown — I’m embedded in the HR department. They are trying to get better at data management to make better decisions with data. Their data systems are older and there are problems with consistency just because there are so many different systems. I’m helping them get the information they need more quickly.
It’s helped a lot to be able to have space in the school corporation’s office. Some of it is just relationship-building — working next to these people, I obviously have a little bit more credibility, because I’m there doing the same stuff as everybody else.
Strategically, it’s just really helpful to be present and get a better idea of what they’re trying to do with data.
It helps me understand the issues that the corporation is dealing with. It also makes it much easier to give suggestions and to realize what a successful project would look like.
What are the tangible things in the school system that this data impacts?
It can be really varied. Since I’m in the HR department, it mainly has to do with personnel decisions. The school corporation continually needs information about how many teachers have a certain certification, for example. Recently, they were doing teacher contract negotiations so it was a matter of figuring out how many teachers in the South Bend schools are making a certain amount of money. With that information, they could make better decisions on improving teacher compensation. Another part is that the school corporation has to send information to the state on a pretty regular basis — these are our teachers and these are the students they have. It’s a matter of compiling those reports.
Can you break down the deliverables for this project?
We’re still figuring out final deliverables. On a small level, the first part I helped them do was really specific data analysis for teacher contract negotiations. Moving forward, the first part of deliverables will most likely be a current state analysis or a process map to help them realize how they’re using data right now, and the ways that some of their processes operate. Broadly it would be a current state analysis. The next deliverable would be recommendations for either changes or improvements or new ways of doing things and then ultimately the last part will be training and evaluation to figure out if what we changed is actually working.
How did you get paired up with this project?
enFocus works on a sort of match system. I didn’t choose it off a list, but it’s more of a matter of matching skills with the project. So obviously, the project has a lot to do with data management, but it’s also just broadly in the education realm. Education is one of the things I’m interested in but I also have a background in data analysis. It was a good match.
Tell us about your background.
enFocus was a good match for me because I’m really interested in problem solving. I thought I was really interested in doing research, but ended up being much more interested in practical applications of research — not really actually doing the research but putting it to use.
enFocus is a cool middle-ground between doing research and turning it into something that people actually use. That translation doesn’t always happen naturally.
Before this, I was in a PhD program for Sociology at Notre Dame, but had this realization that I wasn’t very interested in doing research for research’s sake. In undergrad, I studied Anthropology and Peace Studies. I grew up in Colorado, actually, then came here for school.
Most of the time, Fellows start at the end of July, and are here for a year. I am on a different timeframe because I started part-time with enFocus in January to help out with a couple of projects. Then I started full-time in April. At that point in time, I was working on a different project in Elkhart. In early September, enFocus got this project with South Bend School Corporation, so I started working on this then. I’ll complete this project and finish at enFocus with the rest of the Fellows in July 2019 .
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