Teach Oregon Application Service

The Teach Oregon Application Service was an application for the Oregon School Personnel Association designed to help School Districts and Teachers find each other. I was lead programmer and administrator on the project that began in 1999 and was in active use through 2004. The application was used by 200 school districts in Oregon and more than 7,000 teachers. Security of information was very important to the client who had to contend not only with the safety of large volumes of personal information, but also the legal overhead of public agencies and their hiring practices. In this case I prepared and managed a complete server computer on the clients premises including licensing, webserver, data server, and secure socket layer applications.

There were three primary sections of the web site:

• Teachers -- This section was where teachers could list their quailifications, certifications, history, and skills. Broken into a dozen sections users could update their materials whenever they wished, and once their forms were complete, could select which school districts they were interested in working for. Due to legacy concerns the database was in Microsoft Access which posed some structural and responsiveness challenges that had to be carefully tuned. In most cases i prefer to use MySQL for a dataset of this size (7,000 records with a couple hundred fields spread over a dozen tables).
• Districts --- This section allowed Oregon School Districts to do several things: 1) Track all teaching applicants interested in their district - including the ability to download complete datasets for use in their own internal applications. 2) Maintain and update any specialized application materials they might want in addition to the standard set supplied by the website. 3) Communicate by email with teaching applicants who they were tracking. 4) Search for teachers. This latter was a sophisticated search algorithm that allowed districts to seek compound criteria (e.g. I want teachers with more than six years of experience who are looking for part time jobs who can teach English and coach volleyball) and to store result sets for latter reference (e.g. A personnel officer could search for and select several applicants and save that set for access by their principal later on.). 5) Reporting was available so that districts had an ongoing idea of how many applications they had received, how active those applicants had been, and of course Equal Opportunity Employer information.
• Control -- This section allowed the system administrator to track all aspects of the application. Reports were available for district and teacher information. The administrator could track, and approve, payments by the teachers and districts and also edit the 'hardwired' data that occasionally got scrambled (e.g. people misentering social security numbers). Other administrative tasks like updating the districts lists, and moving applicants into the 'inactive' file were automated from the control section.