TestHound Success Story: Creating Consistency and Confidence Across Humble ISD

“Before TestHound, we just used general Excel spreadsheets,” she said. “Our high schools used File Share for organization. TestHound originally came in strictly for materials tracking. That was really the beginning of it.”

Katie Gomez, Lead Coordinator of Student Assessment and District Testing Coordinator, had seen firsthand how much work could go into managing assessment processes without a shared tool. Before coming to Humble ISD, she worked in a district where staff devoted significant time creating room rosters, accommodation lists, signage, and spreadsheets that could be used with the state's testing vendor.

“There was a lot of time spent creating forms that looked streamlined and polished, plus room rosters and accommodation lists for test day.” Katie said. “We spent a lot of time teaching people how to use Excel to do exactly what was needed to communicate with the district office and the state testing vendor.”

Beyond the time involved, relying on manual processes also created more opportunities for important information to be missed. As Katie explained, “With human error alone, the chances and the likelihood of an accommodation just not even being communicated go way up.”

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At Humble ISD, the challenge was compounded by the range of experience among campus testing coordinators.

“At our secondary campuses, we have dedicated campus testing coordinators (CTCs), people who have a certain skill set to oversee testing,” Katie said. “But, at the elementary level, the test coordinator role is often an additional responsibility assigned on top of someone’s primary role, and the skill set varies quite a bit.”

Some new coordinators arrived with a clear understanding of what a test administration should look like. Others were learning how all the pieces fit together for the first time. For Katie, Julie, and Cynthia, creating consistency meant giving each of them a process they can understand, repeat, and eventually manage confidently on their own.

The Solution

Rather than asking every campus testing coordinator to create processes from scratch, the Humble ISD assessment team built a shared approach that could carry from one administration to the next.

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TestHound supported that approach by giving coordinators a consistent tool for organizing their work.

“Once they got it down for one test, because of our use of TestHound and how it shows up in all of our administrations. They felt very confident and ready,” Katie said.

Training was a major part of making that consistency possible. Training was a major part of making that consistency possible. Julie created a living manual with screenshots and step-by-step guidance that walked coordinators through tasks such as accepting alerts, creating test sessions, marking students absent, running reports, and preparing files for use in other testing systems.

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Cynthia Stohs, Student Assessment Specialist, worked closely with new CTCs as they learned how to use the tool in practice.

“I tell them often, you can't mess it up,” Cynthia said. “If you mess it up, we're going to delete it. We're going to just start over. It's okay. Just play with it and get used to it.”

Accommodations were another major part of that shared process.

“Organizing, communicating, and implementing accommodations is one of the core reasons we use TestHound,” Katie said. “It’s become the center of how we manage that work.”

That central role mattered in a district Humble ISD’s size, where accommodation decisions involved testing staff, campuses, and special programs. Katie explained that those groups had ongoing conversations about accommodations throughout the year, including annual training that brought special programs and testing stakeholders together. Having a shared tool gave those teams a consistent way to communicate and verify student needs as decisions were made.

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That work also earned support beyond the assessment team. Katie said TestHound has been “widely received and accepted and championed by our special program leads in the district as well.” For a district serving a large number of students who received additional support, she described that piece as “critical.”

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She also stressed that the tool did not replace the people responsible for making sure students received the support they needed. Instead, it helped reduce the risk that information got lost across conversations, spreadsheets, or form submissions.

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Katie said the value of that consistency was ultimately measured by whether students received the support they needed.

“Getting the accommodations right is crucial, because that's what's important to our kids,” she said. “Those things make a big difference and impact our students.”

TestHound also supported the team’s work with Cambium’s TIDE system. Julie explained that reports aligned with TIDE terminology helped coordinators identify the correct files for tasks such as rostering and test attributes.

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TestHound became a central hub for Humble ISD, but that role extended beyond accommodations. TestHound gave Humble ISD a place to organize assessment information before the team prepared it for use with other systems, including Cambium’s TIDE.  

The Result  

For Humble ISD, the results showed up most clearly in the confidence of the people responsible for carrying out testing across the district.

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Cynthia worked with new campus testing coordinators each year and watched them move from learning the basics to applying the same processes across state assessments, district benchmarks, classroom assessments, and other campus needs.

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As they became more comfortable, they began taking greater ownership of the work and sharing what they learned with others.

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Cynthia recalled one new CTC who had to step in and help with additional test administrations. The district team could monitor behind the scenes and make sure everything was running smoothly, but they didn’t have to take over.

“We didn’t have to touch it,” Cynthia said. “She was the one controlling it and working through it. She took it and ran.”  

That kind of confidence mattered in a district where many coordinators were balancing testing with other responsibilities.

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It also allowed Katie, Julie, and Cynthia to spend less time teaching people how to create individual forms and spreadsheets and more time helping campuses understand the bigger picture of a successful test administration.

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TestHound supported that work, but the people remained at the center of it.

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Katie described that balance when discussing accommodations. She explained that systems could make communication easier and reduce the chance of human error, but they could not replace the responsibility educators had to one another or to their students.

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That same consistency reached classrooms, too. Teachers could check a student’s accommodations ahead of testing day, confirming that details like text-to-speech or a supplemental aid were already reflected in the system, so nothing had to be tracked down last minute.

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Beyond the day-to-day testing process, Humble ISD also valued the relationship it built with the Education Advanced team. For Katie, that responsiveness and sense of partnership were part of what made the experience different.

“I think it’s unique to find a close feeling between a district and a vendor,” she said. “We feel close to the company. That means a lot to us.”

For Humble ISD’s assessment team, the goal was to give campus coordinators the support and confidence to do their jobs well so that when testing day arrived, every student had what they needed.

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For Katie, Julie, and Cynthia, the real measure of success isn't necessarily fewer spreadsheets, but every student walking into testing with exactly what they need.

The Product  

TestHound is a comprehensive K-12 testing software and the only test enablement solution that integrates data from disparate systems into a single tool for efficient assessment coordination. By utilizing the efficiencies provided through the tool, tasks that could take several days to accomplish using alternative methods can be done within a matter of hours. TestHound empowers overextended school staff to efficiently and accurately coordinate K-12 assessments, allowing them to spend their valuable time on other priorities.

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