After Tyler SIS ended its time working with schools, most districts transferred over to Powerschool. Since so many schools were trying to start using their new system, the Powerschool company got overwhelmed and didn’t have enough staff to account for the growth. This made the company slow to respond and hard to work with, and it became obvious that the calculations for GPAs and transcripts were wrong.
“The semester ended and the counselors were down there finding all these mistakes with GPA and attendance, it was all calculated incorrectly,” Principal Ted Happel said.
Because things were calculated inaccurately, the office staff would have to look over every individual student’s information and change it accordingly. If someone had dropped a class, it wouldn’t leave their schedule and they would receive an F for that class.
“The biggest problem is the customization necessary to support the St. Charles School District is taking much more time than anticipated,” Assistant Superintendent of Operations Jeremy Shields said.
Along with the struggles with grades, at the beginning of the year freshmen were not coming up in the system, and had to be transferred from Tyler separately. That also meant students were not added to Powerschool’s All Call system, the SCHS system for letting staff and students know information outside of the building. Some staff also were not alerted to the snow days.
We have two dedicated employees with one being new to the software that work diligently to address immediate needs. This requires significant support from PowerSchool, which, at times, is lacking.
— Jeremy Shields
“They [the district] are switching back to the other system because it seems more reliable than the one in Powerschool,” Happel said.
Most teachers and office workers were very used to using Tyler SIS, as they had used it for several years, but they are taking on the problems with Powerschool with ease and have recently finalized and sent out first semester’s grades. With a little hope, Powerschool will get easier to use and understand.
“We could have used Tyler this year, but we made the jump to change to Powerschool thinking we would get more help and assistance when we didn’t,” Happel said.
