School districts in Oklahoma are currently faced with the challenge of improving classroom instruction, data retrieval, and accountability in an ever-changing society. There exists a need to create newer, faster, and more unified software systems which will enable the Oklahoma school districts to forward information on request/receive demand. In the near future, school districts across the state will be responsible for gathering and sharing an array of reported data including formative academic assessments in grades five, eight, ten, twelve, and end-of-instruction assessments; attendance and suspension rates; real-time student report cards to meet the needs of No Child Left Behind Act; and ACT/SAT college entrance examination scores. 
Exploring information beyond the data achieved through the minimum state-Criteria Reference (CRT) results, Oklahoma school districts must determine the best method to assess student progress and to plan instruction. To accomplish the growing demand on data retrieval, Enid Public Schools (EPS) has developed an approach for gathering and implementing accountability data which would ensure improvement of student learning and records sharing. With the installation of the WAVE server completed, EPS will need the Zone Integration Server (ZIS) architecture in order to make multi-measure data useful in the facilitation of change.
Through the development of ZIS architecture, EPS will be able to access a number of centrally located data analysis tools for tracking school improvement while allowing the flexibility of adding future applications to the data sharing zone. Such data analysis will include monitoring district constructed benchmark assessments; measuring student performances through content analysis; tracking at-risk student performance; and providing real-time student assessment information to the Oklahoma Department of Education WAVE server through an Extensible Markup Language (XML), industry Open Standard data format which allows state and federal agencies the readability of pertinent student-tracking information. The Open Standard data format, provided through an SIF framework, will enable our district to share data that moves among other software applications to support 'horizontal interoperability.' This data sharing will allow EPS administrators and teachers to streamline data management and create a true information management system. The newly designed system will integrate disparate data repositories through a platform-independent, vendor-neutral communications architecture based on Open Standard rule.
