Massachusetts Executive Office of Education Saves $1.5M Per Year and Fuels Data-Driven Policymaking

Centralizing educational data in Snowflake provided a scalable analytics environment for EOE, but business users seemed hesitant at first to abandon familiar workflows and tooling. Remote work during COVID-19, workforce changes and the agency’s evolving analytical needs ultimately drove organic adoption of Snowflake. Ultimately, the results and ease of use rapidly won analysts over. “Users can quickly respond to data requests and questions because of the ease of use of Snowflake,” Ondrick says. “Our analyst community has all their data in Snowflake and can easily access it.”

Thanks to consolidated queries and documentation in Snowflake Notebooks, EOE analysts now seamlessly prepare data with SQL and Python, perform data validations and automate multi-step processes. Snowflake Notebooks also enables the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) team to streamline reporting workflows. “We’ve migrated a lot of those workflows to Snowflake Notebooks,” says Miranda Dynan, Project Manager at the EOE. “Preparing a report doesn’t have to be a cumbersome process that takes two weeks. You can run a notebook, validate it and get it out the door in a couple of hours in Snowflake.” EOE’s reimagined solution for school finance data analysis now also runs on Snowflake Notebooks.

Every second counts. Calculating the current year’s student growth percentile (SGP), a key metric that indicates students’ mastery of grade-level standards, previously required more than five hours on a local desktop machine. Running the same analysis, plus six additional years of progress targets, with RStudio in Snowpark Container Services now happens 93% faster — in just minutes. 

Thanks to Snowflake’s integration with Microsoft Power BI, commissioners, charter school boards and Massachusetts residents can now immediately access key metrics, including student enrollment, attendance, and suspension and graduation rates, through a user-friendly interactive visualization. Reduced data wrangling now frees up capacity for innovative work and empowers everyone — from policymakers to parents — with critical information.

Powered by Snowflake, on-demand educational insights now inform policy decisions that impact everything from early child care to community college funding and career outcomes across Massachusetts. “We’re always looking at the policies, scholarships, awards and expenditures to evaluate return on investment,” says Danielle Nortion, Senior Program Manager, Integrated Digital Data Services (IDDS), at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Education. “We’re acutely interested in whether a policy decision is actually working out and depend on Snowflake to evaluate this.” Data-informed educational policy that will impact children for generations to come ultimately starts with modernized data architecture.

Thanks to Snowflake Secure Dating Sharing, EOE plans to also bypass time-consuming Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) processes and expand collaboration. According to Ondrick, “We’re queuing up partners inside and outside the state to use the data sharing feature in Snowflake.” Snowflake Horizon offers another opportunity to further simplify EOE’s data ecosystem and reduce costs. 

The potential economies of scale for EOE with Snowflake don’t stop there. Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex AI offer another meaningful opening to elevate productivity at EOE. An initial proof of concept may eventually change how school districts review audit documents. “We’re testing Snowflake Intelligence for reading files from an S3 bucket,” Dynan says. “It’s proving really promising, and another team already asked if they could use it for their PDFs.”

With Snowflake by EOE’s side, this is just the beginning of how Massachusetts can use data to support its mission of providing the best educational opportunities for every citizen across the Bay State for generations to come.