Student Information System

After an in-depth evaluation by staff and administration the Board of Education has approved migrating our Student Information System (SIS) from Infinite Campus to PowerSchool. Some of the major factors in the decision to make the change include:

• Local support and hosting from Kent ISD
• Better integration with our special education and behavior management software
• Open architecture that supports third party applications
• Lower cost

While implementation planning is still in progress some considerations and a general timeline are outlined below:

• We will complete the 2018-19 school year on Infinite Campus.
• We will start the 2019-20 school year on PowerSchool.
• The development of a training plan is in progress.
• You will see a preview of the PowerSchool grade book and attendance at a staff meeting prior to the end of this school year.
• Comprehensive online resources will be available before the end of this school year.
• We will start the data migration in May and will run both systems in parallel during the month of June.
• Trainers will be available in buildings after school starts to assist with grade book and attendance questions.

Migrating to a new student information system is no trivial task. It will affect almost everyone to varying degrees. However, we will have much better local support from KISD and the PowerSchool online resources are excellent. Information on demonstrations and access to online resources will be forthcoming.

Managed Help Desk

To Begin Immediately After Spring Break

We are planning to restructure technology department operations to establish a full time staffed Help Desk. This position will answer the help desk phone, monitor emails to the help desk, and direct field resources to high priority issues when necessary.

Improved Support
We have a goal in the technology department to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our support efforts. It is key that all support requests are processed through our help desk system. Too many requests are currently made to technology department individuals by phone or email. This interrupts our workflow and skews the priority of what we are working on.

We will be encouraging people to make requests through the help desk, preferably with a help desk ticket. Eventually we will start funneling all phone calls and emails to the help desk for processing.

Phone: 7990
Email: helpdesk@calschools.org

Services
The help desk technician will be responsible for the following:

• answer the help desk phone 
• monitor the help desk email
• assist walk-in staff
• resolve some issues immediately like resetting a password or voicemail PIN
• remotely connect to a computer to troubleshoot and resolve issues
• open help desk tickets
• monitor help desk tickets and direct field resources when necessary
• develop documentation
• develop PD resources

Please note, the help desk phone and email is not a substitute for help desk tickets. It is a method to address higher priority issues more quickly. It is expected that staff still submit a help desk ticket for all technical support issues.

Timeline
The timeline is for this to go live after spring break.