New student information system had many glitches

Beginning a new school year is always an exciting time for administrators, teachers and students. But for those in the Corvallis School District, last week’s start-up might evoke another adjective: Exhausting.

A new student-information system installed over the summer to make educators’ jobs easier created a number of glitches for schools’ registration processes:

• Office workers at Adams Elementary School discovered individual class lists included both last year’s and this year’s students, making them twice as long as they should be.

• A number of teachers in the district couldn’t log onto the new system. Other who could found classes were “missing” from their electronic grade books.

• Both high schools had major scheduling problems. Students who dropped one class to take another showed up on both class lists and teachers weren’t sure who was supposed to be in their classes.

Corvallis High School principal Dawn Granger said her staff didn’t get a list of student’s classes until 10 minutes before they began registration, a week before school started. This left no time to review the schedules. At one point, the office had a backlog of about 200 calls requesting appointments to fix students’ schedules, Granger said. Some staff members worked several days until midnight trying to correct the situation.

“It could have been crazy with 1,300 students (at CHS), but everybody pitched in,” Granger said. “Both the students and teachers handled it so well.” Except for students’ adviser schedules, she said, “most people were in the right place at the right time by the second day.”

After checking in with each school Wednesday morning, Corvallis’ technology manager Duane Jager said he was confident most schools’ systems were working properly now. “Everything looks good; it just took some time to get the systems talking to each other correctly,” Jager said.

According to Susan Waddell, superintendent of the Linn-Benton-Lincoln Educational Service District, which manages the information system, Corvallis was not alone in its startup troubles. Speaking to the Corvallis School Board on Monday night, she said problems surfaced throughout the region.

Ten of the 12 school districts in the ESD voted to implement the new system this year. Lebanon and Philomath chose different programs.

“Implementation of software is hard,” Waddell said. The new system involves three different applications, which weren’t integrated until the beginning of the school year.

Each of the different components had been individually tested, Jager said. But when new scheduling software was mixed in with the other elements of the program, they didn’t communicate with each other properly, he said.

“All the high schools in the three counties (of the ESD) use very different schedules and there just wasn’t time to test how each one would react in the system,” Jager said, adding the block schedules used at the two Corvallis high schools are especially complex.

Although it had a rough start, the new information system should be a valuable tool for administrators, teachers, students and parents. It gives them all equal access to daily schedules, classroom assignments, grade reports and attendance data. It also includes a feature that allows schools to track behavioral problems according to where and what time of day incidents occur, who’s involved and who reported the problem.

Teachers appreciate how the system makes classroom management much easier. All recordkeeping — including taking attendance, describing student assignments and posting grades — can be done online, even from a home computer.

Parents can keep better track of their student’s progress and can sign up for personal e-mails alerting them when their child is absent, receives a failing grade or doesn’t turn in an assignment.

What’s so valuable about the system, Jager said, is being able to cross-check academic achievement with other factors such as attendance and behavioral data.

Cheldelin and Crescent Valley High School helped pilot the grading and attendance portion of the system, called Pinnacle, last spring.

Because all information is password-protected, it will take time for each school to assign student codes and passwords and to instruct parents on how to use the Pinnacle program. Principal Granger said she hoped parents at CHS would be able to access the system sometime in October.

Elementary school teachers are not currently using the grade-book feature, but the district is trying to develop a new elementary progress report that might be integrated into the Pinnacle system in the future, Jager said.