The District 225 Board of Education has decided to replace its current student information system, SchoolLogic, with PowerSchool.

Dr. Michael Riggle, District 225 superintendent, said he believes that the program’s performance determined the switch.

“We’ve got expectations for the district, the work environment for people and accuracy of information, and we’ve made a good, solid, honest effort with a software product that we felt we were going to grow with and do a good job with” Riggle said. “But it’s just not performing on the level that we would have expected. So, it’s time for us to move to a different software product.”

SchoolLogic, comprised of SchoolLogic Student Management System, HomeLogic home access portal and TeacherLogic educator portal, has been the District’s student information system for the past two years. In 2009, the District agreed to switch to SchoolLogic from the previous system, Schools Administrative Student Information (SASI), according to Riggle.

PowerSchool was also considered in 2009, but was not selected, as it was not considered robust enough at the time. During this period, Pearson Education had recently purchased the PowerSchool program from Apple Inc., and while Pearson had plans to renovate the program, they did not have enough time to do so. SchoolLogic was the program chosen instead and was implemented in 2010 under a three year contract.

However, after two years with SchoolLogic, the district has grown dissatisfied with its performance.

“It’s just a matter of][…]ease of use and consistent, reliable functionality,” GBS Principal Dr. Brian Wegley said.

Riggle believes the greatest problem with SchoolLogic is customization.

“We were hopeful that the company would be able to customize things to improve it to meet the way we work,” Riggle said. “And the customizations—when [the company behind SchoolLogic] was able to complete some of them—oftentimes caused [SchoolLogic] to have errors in other parts of the software.”

PowerSchool is expected to have many more capabilities than SchoolLogic and be more user-friendly. It is also more easily customized and will not crash as often, according to Wegley. Additionally, PowerSchool will also run on Pearson-hosted servers instead of running on local servers like SchoolLogic. Riggle said that this is expected to reduce costs.

GBS will not be the only local school using PowerSchool. According to Dr. Rosanne Williamson, assistant superintendent for educational services, many other districts in the area use PowerSchool, as well as the majority of elementary schools that feed into both GBS and GBN.

PowerSchool will provide the same services to students and parents that are currently available on HomeLogic, as well as potential new features, according to Williamson.

“Students and parents will still have access to the same type of information that is available in HomeLogic with the possibility of tying in other systems similar to Moodle and/or Google applications to the student/parent portal,” Williamson said.

According to Williamson, GBS and GBN teachers will need training with the new system before the start of the 2013-2014 school year. The switch will hopefully help teachers in the long run, Riggle said.

“When teachers are working hard to do data entry, to get the grade books in [TeacherLogic] properly, and they can’t tell whether or not something has saved properly, or, all of a sudden, they’re halfway through entering a long series of grades and something freezes and they lose all the effort they put into it before—that’s not only frustrating, [but] it becomes unfair, and a valuable loss of[…]hours that we can’t recoup,” Riggle said.

Science teacher Despina Mandarino said that she thinks the switch to PowerSchool will be beneficial to teachers.

“The system overall, I think, runs more smoothly and runs more like a speadsheet, so I think…it’s going to be more intuitive and it’s going to be easier to use for each teacher,” Mandarino said.

Daniel Rhoades, social studies teacher, also favors the switch. Rhoades said that the most frustrating features of SchoolLogic were its impracticality, unappealing interface, and incompatability with Moodle.

“The goal of the District is to stay with PowerSchool long-term,” Williamson said. “This will depend upon the performance of the product. It is important for end-users—students, teachers [and] parents—to have a student information system that meets their needs.”

PowerSchool will be implemented July 3, 2013.