School District 308’s switch to PowerSchool continues to bring many problems to staff, students, and parents. The most recent issue the SD#308 parent, student, and staff community experienced took place during the week of Oct. 30.
Deputy Superintendent Dr. Heather Kincaid explained, “PowerSchool did an update to the Google Sync. And what it did was [create] for some teachers a repeating of grades; some teachers [it] didn’t impact at all, some teachers [were] impacted a little bit.”
After realizing this problem existed, the district technology and educational administrative team decided to temporarily turn off students’ ability to view their grades so tech could try and fix this problem.
“[Functionality] was turned off for parents and students while teachers looked at their grade books and reviewed [them] to make sure it was accurate,” OH Instructional Technology Coach Jaclyn King said.
Grade updates were again available to parents and students within a week, but the incident caused confusion among students as they were left in the dark about the system’s functionality.
“The link between PowerSchool and Google Classroom on our part has been shut down for right now,” Kincaid said in an interview in early December. “We stopped the integration because we didn’t want any challenges to keep on occurring.”
Given the extent of the problems PowerSchool has shown since the beginning of the year, students have been asking why SD#308 purchased PowerSchool as a replacement to the previously-implemented Tyler student information system (SIS).
According to Kincaid, the decision to transition to PowerSchool came after a long process involving a variety of people from different parts of the district. Kincaid headed this group as they tried to figure out the best choice for a new SIS.
“What we had done is we … put together our rubric in terms of … how we would rate different areas of the SIS. We’d also … put together our list of mandatory questions,” Kincaid explained. “Does your system do this and do this? What kind of reports does it do? What kind of functionality does it have? And then we had gathered those kind[s] of questions through a series of surveys.”
The committee eventually narrowed the selection to two different SIS: PowerSchool and InfiniteCampus. They had both presenters return to give more details about their respective systems. After a final assessment, the committee made their decision and proposed a new SIS to the Board of Education.
“We brought our final selection and our process to the board. So after our reviews, we put together the proposal,” Kincaid said.
Although the transition was a research-based decision, problems with PowerSchool persist.
“We were not aware we would have issues,” Director of Technology Brent Kiger said. “Leading up to the migration, we were told that they did support Google Classroom integration and had a published document on how to configure the integration.”
“It wasn’t until after enabling it that we discovered their integration wasn’t as clean as we would have expected,” Kiger continued. “We have since been told by PowerSchool that they are working to resolve the issues with a new version.”
As of publication time (Dec. 7), the process of integration with Google Classroom is still stopped to prevent the problem from occurring again.
“We’ll look again at the integration [again] either for the start of second semester or the start of next school year,” Kincaid said.
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