Croxteth Comprehensive School Profile

American Community Schools

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Founded in 1967 to serve the expatriate community, ACS comprises three non-sectarian, co-educational schools (day and boarding) for students from 3-19 years of age. It educates a multi-national student body in accordance with both American and internationally recognised educational principles and practices.

The American Community School's three campuses are all situated in the Greater London area, and are well within comfortable daily commuting distance of the City. The largest campus, at ACS Cobham, is situated south-west of the capital and accommodates over 1,200 students, including 100 boarders; ACS Egham is the campus west of London near Virginia Water and has over 550 students; and the ACS Hillingdon campus, north-west of London, provides the educational environment for over 650 students. All campuses offer not only pre-kindergarten through 12th Grade college preparatory programs but also, importantly, the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. Additionally, ACS Cobham and ACS Hillingdon offer Advanced Placement (AP) programs, while students at ACS Egham have a further option: the International Baccalaureate Primary Years and Middle Years programs.

According to Damian Kelly at ACS: "We use a number of operating systems. Our administration departments work mainly with Windows while our academic divisions are based on the Mac OS. The cross-platform nature of the FileMaker range of products allows us to develop solutions without worrying about the platforms they will be deployed on. In order to administer our Admissions and overall school management information functions, we run software developed by inResonance in FileMaker. Two packages, Portal and Keystone, both supplied by inResonance, are being rolled out to all three campuses at the moment. The flexibility and ease of use of our FileMaker solutions impresses end users in all locations. In addition, specific IT issues are solved using FileMaker. A typical example is where we use FileMaker to track cars permitted on campus - a solution developed in-house allows our Support Services Department to quickly and effectively record who is permitted to drive onto campus. This is a classic example of the wide variety of solutions that are distributed throughout our establishment; all performing critical functions to ACS."

Concludes Kelly: "Future plans include integrating an online directory of parents contact details within the internal FileMaker system using XML. Using XML to exchange data between systems is key to how we envisage moving data between locations and systems. FileMaker's robust support for XML is another key reason for our continuing use of the product."