For as long as school districts have been organized, the institutions have been charged with not only educating students, but also keeping meticulous records of the performance of its children — and the teachers who mold their minds.

That’s meant paperwork: reams and reams of test scores, employee evaluations and other records. In the Issaquah School District thus far, the information age had only managed to alter that task by taking physical paper out of the equation — whenever employee evaluations rolled around, administrators found themselves filling out the same Adobe Acrobat document ad nauseum.

This year the district will further implement two software programs into school operations with the intent of boosting efficiency and analytical power.

By far the larger of the two rollouts is Homeroom, a program from School Data Solutions that tracks students’ performance on state and district assessments. The program has been used in a lesser capacity for the past four years while teaching and learning staff integrated it into district operations and provided optional training to teachers.

But, as school year 2014-2015 moves forward, the district will deliver teachers a steady flow of reports on their students’ academic strengths and weaknesses. Homeroom’s  information will be presented on a spreadsheet that can be converted to visually friendly charts and graphs.

“They’re really being thoughtful about what information the teacher will need without overwhelming them with all of it,” school board Director Anne Moore said following a public briefing (audio recording linked) on the status of the program. “As valuable as it all is, when you get it all at once it’s like it’s a firehose.”

The information can be paired up, taken apart and examined in many different ways, with much of the grunt work automated. The hope is that the tool will allow teachers to identify students who need help immediately — and free up their time to do so.

Dennis Wright likened the effect to a well-known chaos theory anecdote: that the seemingly insignificant flap of a butterfly’s wings, through a long chain of cause and effect, could be the difference that makes a hurricane a world away.

“Under the old system, a student and teacher might enter a new school year and it will take that teacher three weeks to realize he’s having trouble with reading,” he said. “But under the new system, that teacher can see the records on that student from last year and (see the problem immediately). The difference of those three weeks early on could be tremendous.”

Wright, the director of career and counseling services for the school district, is the author of another application being introduced to Issaquah schools —  one that might be considered a less-robust Homeroom for teachers. The program allows administrators to handle teacher evaluations — once input manually into myriad forms — under a single database.

Wright began work on the program almost a year ago. The reason for the program was simple: administrators were spending too much time retrieving old evaluations and filing new ones.

Wright coded the program in PHP and MySQL Server for nine months while taking input from administrators on their needs. It was introduced to elementary campuses on Thursday and will be introduced to secondary schools in the coming week.

“If you can spend time helping teachers become better teachers instead of focusing on rote mechanical input, that’s worthwhile,” Wright said.