Overview
empower allows you to:
- Generate real-time focus and analysis of student group performance;
- Integrate student data from multiple stakeholders — schools, community partners, colleges;
- Collaborate across school and community partners to plan for student success;
- Access student information via dashboards and analytics; and
- Track interactions with students as individuals and groups
empower was developed by the Council for Opportunity in Education — the voice of college opportunity, with a forty-year track record of commitment to college access and success.
SHARILYN BROWN
How One Data System Met My APR Needs and Eased the Burden on My Staff
I’m Sharilyn Brown, a former TRIO director of both Talent Search and Upward Bound programs and past president of NAEOP. I have 28 years of service in TRIO, including experience as a peer reviewer of all types of TRIO programs. Two years ago, I boldly decided to transition our APR and student data to empower, the Council for Opportunity in Education’s (COE) powerful APR and student data tool. I worked with empower since 2020, two years before I retired.
Why did I make this decision? My experience with an outdated cumbersome system and years of frustration with managing the APR. Our database was developed 20 years ago and was an access-based web program, not Oracle-based like empower. Maintaining this outdated system led to high costs, mainly related to updating the system to meet the requirements of the APR. To avoid these costs, we manually managed the data in excel spreadsheets, which became too difficult to manage over time.