CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION
The purpose of every technology is to simplify people’s day to day activities. Even though the
technology of now our days is rapidly growing at speed of light, but schools are not up to date
with today’s technology especially secondary schools (Mouhammed, 2011). Dissatisfied with
struggling with a system that seems to add your work and which does not work the way your
school those? Do you want a computerized system that will function well with many of time
saving features that will assist to get jobs done accurately and efficiently? Do you want
professional working reports and integration? Then look at UMYCK management system
(Emberm, 2012).

Today, which we call information age as many technologic developments have been experienced;
the biggest risk that an organization could take is to stay insensitive to change. Many significant
factors such as continuous developments in information technologies, information exchange,
increasing expectations of the society, modern managing perceptions and applications cause
organizations all over the world to develop new applications in order to survive (Demir, 2003).

Introduction of school management information systems to schools have caused significant changes
in roles and working styles of managers (Telem, 1999). School management information systems
have changed school management in the areas of leadership, decision making, workload, human
resource management, communication, responsibility and planning (Gurr, 2000). Strategically
school management information systems help the manager in determining the aims of the school,
making long term plans, distributing resources, and forming educational methods of future,
determining performances of teachers and success of the school (Telem&Buvitski, 1995; Telem,
1991).

Researchers, programmers, and college principals have been working together to come up with
different kinds of procedures that will function as easiest way of managing school data to
administrators and teachers. But certainly there is an area for changes and development in certain
areas of school management system. Majority of the recent secondary school management
systems that have being presented use similar procedure that is used to manage school data;
mostly the administrators can register new student, update student record, search for the student,
view student result, print the result and the teachers can manage the students attendance .
A school management system is a large database system which can be used
Most schools still use papers as tools to carry out their administration and management process.
However computers are not used to analyze data and output information. For this, there is a need for
School management system to transcend to paperless environment. The automation of the manual
system to stand alone system will facilitate administration staffs to manage the school activities and
whole academic process by keeping track of all the data more efficiently and effectively (Fetaji et
al., 2013).

1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY

Automation is the utilization of technology to replace human with a machine that can perform
more quickly and more continuously [2]. By automating SMS documents that took up many large
storage rooms can be stored on few disks. Transcript images can be annotated. It reduces the time
to retrieve old transcripts from hours to seconds. However, the school system in the government
schools of Addis Ababa is not automated and the record officers generate transcripts and reports
manually and the school administrators use their experienced knowledge of miss and hit
approaches to prepare timetables.

Education system forms the backbone of every nation. And hence it is important to provide a
strong educational foundation to the young generation to ensure the development of open-minded
global citizens securing the future for everyone. Advanced technology available today can play a
crucial role in streamlining education-related processes to promote solidarity among students,
teachers, parents and the school staff.

Education is central to development. It is one of the most powerful instruments for reducing
poverty and inequality and lays a foundation for sustained economic growth. With this aim
currently our government has given special emphasis to the educational sector and school
improvement activities such as continuous professional development for teachers, training and
upgrading teachers and capacitating schools with manpower and materials are among the major
actions which have been taken in both primary and secondary schools. In order to facilitate and
simplify these actions one of the major tool is to have automated school management system.
School Management System(SMS) consists of tasks such as registering students, attendance record
keeping to control absentees, producing official transcript, reparing timetable and producing
different reports for teachers, parents, and students and lots more.
1.3 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
To help promote students achievement and success, schools must have access to complete, accurate,
and timely information about students. One of the benefits of automated SMS is that the student
record system will simplify retrieval of required information and is a great instrument for school
improvement by taking measures from the information acquired. Despite the use of automated
SMS, the government schools in Addis Ababa are using paper based documentation system for
performing various tasks and the school administrators apply their knowledge of hit and miss
approach in scheduling classes and courses (preparing the timetable) which wastes manpower and
much time unnecessarily that does not utilize the current technology.

Transcripts of students are prepared manually by the record officer and teachers. Report cards are
produced by the home-room teachers. Attendance of students is recorded by the home-room
teachers. In order to control absentees and know the number of days that a student has been absent
from the school during the school days the attendance officer has to collect the attendance slips
from the corresponding homeroom teachers and compile it which is also a time taking process. In
addition to that retrieving records of students who have graduated couple of years ago has been a
difficult task and the manual system also has difficulty of producing different reports which are
required by the stakeholders such as teachers, administrators or officials from kebele and kifle-
ketema.

Teachers may want to associate a student with his parent or emergency persons for disciplinary
measures which need searching of the students record in the record office. It has been difficult to
search a record from thousands of such records and observed that students can take any person
claiming that he/she is their parent or emergency person which creates problem in control of
students.

Due to the inefficiency of the current manual system, the need arises to automate SMS in order to
efficiently handle students’ attendance, to produce transcript, and the various reports satisfying
users and customers and to produce timetable which can schedule courses for teachers
and classes of students.
1.4 AIM AND OBJECTIVES
The aim of the project is to build and impliment the Student Managent System prototype.

1.4.1 OBJECTIVES
Creating time table for lectures
Enrolling new students.
Help parents to follow up to their children’s performance in school.
Help the teacher to facilitate access to parents and introduce them to the extent of
deficiencies at the student process.

1.5 METHOD OF ACHIEVING THE OBJECTIVES

The method used to achieve the stated aobjectives is the Prototyping Model. The prototyping model
is a technique for quickly building a function but incomplete model of the information system. The
model was adopted as it resuces development time, cost, and facilitayes system implementation as
users know what to expect.

1.6 SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY

Now these days computer play very important role in any formal organization, because computer
works faster and accurate than human. The purpose of developing the SMS system of any
organization is that to make easy to management to store a large number of data/reports into the
computer. It is difficult for any management to store the large number of data manually or in papers.
In that case when any user wants to take information it is very difficult for management to provide
information immediately. It is very time consuming process. But by using computer it takes only
few minutes/seconds.

1.7 SCOPE OF STUDY

The author intends to build a web based application for school teachers, principal,students, admin
which will be very easy to use for their work purpose. Work with common server or browser which
is very familiar with us. They cannot change the customizations of fonts and colors of the web
application. Security will be simple but if it is need to be build a high security then it will be built
later. I want to focus on the application itself and the features of that application that help build a
good management community.