Designing a Sustainable Data Structure for Exploring Student Well-Being Patterns in Albemarle County Public Schools Throughout COVID-19

Student well-being has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Albemarle County Public Schools (ACPS) has collected a significant and varied amount of K-12 student data throughout COVID-19. Researchers seek to utilize the student data to drive evidence-based policy changes with regard to ACPS student well-being. A structured data system for performing school-related research associated with the well-being of students throughout the pandemic does not exist. We have designed a sustainable, relational data structure for data consolidation and to advance the ongoing research initiatives related to COVID-19 student well-being in collaboration with ACPS. The data structure aims to play an important role in promoting student well-being policies through simplifying data collection, enhancing analysis, and acting as an ongoing tool that can support future phases of research. The design architecture includes a relational database populated with de-identified student data to be hosted in the cloud. Design implementation includes data cleaning, data preprocessing, populating the database, and querying data for validation. Specialized queries are utilized to answer the early questions posed to the data. Validation testing is performed to confirm the database is working as expected. Details of the data pipeline, validation, best data practices, and database design are discussed in the paper.