Most of Georgia’s 180 school districts have agreed to join a statewide computer database that stores student information.

Federal guidelines require school systems to regularly submit reports on student performance to the state.

Until now thousands of those reports had to be sent all at once by school administrators.

That’s because school system records weren’t connected directly to the Department of Education.

Bob Swiggum with the DOE says having all systems on one big network means less work for teachers and less chance for mistakes.

"You can imagine a district with 100,000 kids having to send all the information on those kids for the past 4 months," Swiggm says. "That’s a lot of data and you can imagine the errors that then come back."

Swiggum says better data means better tracking of things like graduation rates and individual student progress.

A spokesperson for the Georgia Association of Educators said the group supports the network as long as it isn’t used to track teachers.

Gwinnett County is the only system that hasn’t signed on because they say they haven’t decided how best to use the system.

Tags: Georgia Department of Education, gae, computer network, student records, Bob Swiggum