Utah State Office of Education Awards the Electronic Student Achievement and Management Data System Contract to DigitalBridge

The Utah State Office of Education and all Utah school districts and charter schools to have access to DigitalSAMS--Student Achievement Management System--to ensure the best education for every Utah student

OREM, Utah - July 17, 2008

DigitalBridge, the leader in protected information sharing technologies and solutions for digital ecosystems, today announced that it has been selected by the Utah State Office of Education for award of a state-wide contract for an Electronic Student Achievement and Management Data System. The DigitalBridge team, which includes Chartwell Education Group, IBM/Cognos, Red Cedar Solutions Group, ProActive School, the National Transcript Center and Docufide, will implement a revolutionary new solution to manage student achievement throughout the State of Utah.

The DigitalSAMS™ solution is the first of its kind in the nation to be deployed in a statewide education ecosystem. Up to 40 Utah school districts and 96 charter schools will utilize the company’s DigitalSAMS solution, allowing teachers, parents, and administrators to gain better visibility and understanding into each student’s individual academic achievement and needs throughout their educational career.

Terry Pitts, President and CEO of DigitalBridge, stated, "We are pleased that the Utah State Office of Education recognizes that DigitalBridge’s DigitalSAMS solution provides the most technologically advanced, functionally rich, and economically priced solution for managing student achievement.” Mr. Pitts added, “Now one single solution will allow sensitive student achievement information to be securely shared across disparate systems throughout the state’s education ecosystem, ensuring that Utah’s children have the opportunity to have the most personalized and customized education possible, proving yet again that Utah’s educators are truly innovators."

"Utah is very pleased to partner with DigitalBridge to provide transparent data to parents, teachers, and students,” said Patti Harrington, Ed.D., State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Utah State Office of Education. “Utah's existing data system has been a leader in the nation, but lacked a statewide portal by which to empower parents and teachers as they make daily instructional decisions. DigitalSAMS will now provide that portal and will enrich both the display and comparability of the data as well as ensure that the data is accessible and useful." Ms. Harrington added, "We are very happy to work with DigitalBridge in our relentless pursuit of academic excellence for every child in Utah."

Currently implemented in 13 of Utah’s 40 school districts, DigitalSAMS has been received with overwhelming satisfaction and praise by teachers and administrators alike. The five year contract will create an overarching structure for managing student achievement information across the state, leveraging prior technology and infrastructure investments in student preparation and performance measurement programs.

DigitalSAMS is far more than a traditional data warehouse or student information system. The solution is an innovative software architecture that gathers both historical and real-time information about an individual student from a variety of disparate data sources, allowing educators, students, parents, administrators, and policy makers to gather, access, act on, share, and, most importantly, protect individual student information. Educators can, for example, view information such as grades, attendance records, test scores, formative and other assessment data for an individual student with point-and-click simplicity. Access to such information is role-based and requires authentication, which is part of the privacy management system inherent in DigitalSAMS.

By extension, individual student-level data can be aggregated for analysis and reporting even at the classroom level, providing the educator a powerful and dynamic tool to evaluate the academic performance of each student. This allows teachers more time to devote to individual student instruction and performance. Further, as data is gathered at the student level, information can be easily aggregated to accommodate classroom, school, district, or state reporting requirements for Utah Performance and Assessment System for Students (“UPASS”), or No Child Left Behind (“NCLB”) compliance reporting purposes.

For further information about DigitalSAMS, please visit: www.digitalbridgeeducation.com

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DigitalBridge was founded in 2004, in Orem, Utah, by industry-leading executives from the technology, education, healthcare, justice and legal industries. The company’s mission is to build solutions that bridge the information gap that exists between organizations involved in complex ecosystems. DigitalBridge’s revolutionary, patent-pending DigitalFusion Platform™ is a completely new architecture for managing information in motion. Our solutions provide protected information sharing to the education, justice, and healthcare markets by leveraging existing technology investments and eliminating barriers to critical information sharing and management while protecting the security, privacy and integrity of the information. Our unique solutions reside on top of existing legacy systems without requiring rip and replace, allowing authorized users to access the right information, at the right time, in the right context, in a secure and timely manner, 24/7/365, from any Web-enabled device.

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