Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

New CCSD software: Harnessing data to help students or a headache for teachers?

Infinite Campus

Steve Marcus

Second-grade teacher Deborah Kovacich takes attendance using the Infinite Campus system at Bell Elementary School on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2014. Infinite Campus is a student-parent-teacher portal that contains everything from a student’s grades to attendance to test scores.

Three teachers are huddled around the laptop like lost travelers over a map.

Confused, they’re navigating the district's new student information website, Infinite Campus, which teachers use to record grades, attendance and other data to share with parents.

“This is, I think, the cumulative grades,” says Randi Wright, a second grade teacher at Rex Bell Elementary School.

She opens up her classroom’s grades. The page is filled with green and red assignment scores and dozens of pull down options and blue links. Where they lead, Wright has no idea. Three months in, she still gets lost in the system’s web.

This is the first year of the Clark County School District’s Infinite Campus roll out. So far, its release has been met with a mix of frustration and optimism from teachers. The learning curve is steep, like jumping from Macintosh computers to Windows, Wright said.

In time, the program is supposed to make teachers’ jobs easier by consolidating student information — from transcripts to attendance to test scores — in one place. But in the nation’s fifth-largest school district, change doesn’t always come easy.

As Wright looks at the page, Deborah Kovacich, another second grade teacher at Bell, notices something wrong.

“You don’t have anything posted,” Kovacich says.

“I don’t have any comments posted?” Wright asks.

“No, you don’t have any grades posted,” Kovacich says.

“I thought they said don’t post unless you absolutely have to,” Wright says.

“Well, I talked to the tech (coach) and she said to go ahead and post as much as you want,” Kovacich says. “You can’t pull up progress reports until you post and save.”

“Oh, that’s why it always comes up blank,” Wright says. “You see? This is how we learn.”

***

Jhone Ebert knew the rollout of Infinite Campus would not be easy for the district.

Changing the habits of more than 18,000 teachers definitely created a challenge, said Ebert, the district’s chief innovation officer. Teachers were accustomed to using two other applications — Easy Grade Pro and the School Administrative Student Information system.

But it was a necessity. The district’s data systems were out of date. If SASI crashed, its parent company wouldn't provide technical support service to fix the issue.

The school board has approved Infinite Campus for $21 million over the next decade. The system is used in more than 2,000 school districts across 42 states, including Washoe County School District in Reno. The district began its rollout in August, first with teachers and then with students. Parents got access at the end of September.

Infinite Campus consolidates a significant amount of of data into one website. It also provides real-time updates to parents on their children’s attendance and grades, and allows them to send messages to the teachers without needing to look up an email address.

Next year, parents will also be able to use it to enroll students in classes, manage education plans and purchase student meal plans. In May, School Board member Deanna Wright called the program a “paradigm shift.”

To prepare teachers, the district has offered multiple training sessions. It has also provided on-call Infinite Campus helpers and designated experts to visit schools on a weekly basis to answer questions. And the teachers’ union holds training classes to ensure the district’s initiative goes smoothly.

From Ebert's perspective, aside from minor bug fixes, the transition has been smooth.

“There are a lot of school districts that have had growing pains when they begin this type of project,” Ebert said. “It’s kind of like using a new phone. Once you know where the buttons are, it’s easy.”

But reaction to the new system has been mixed. Some teachers are frustrated with the time commitment and steep learning curve to adjust to the more complex program, said Vikki Courtney, president of the Clark County Education Association.

Kovacich said it took her two entire Sundays to figure out how to input her students' grades in all the appropriate categories. Wright said she has missed deadlines to file her student progress reports because she can’t figure out how to do it. Marie Wise, a first grade teacher at Bell, felt adjusting to the new data system was too much to ask of teachers, who already are required to manage data to show their students are meeting Nevada Academic Content Standards.

“They put us under the gun to try and get all this stuff done, but then you throw this in front of us,” Wise said. “It’s like stumbling and knocking down all the hurdles when you’re trying to run track. It slows you down.”

Other say that for all the early struggles, the program has begun to pay dividends.

The real-time data allowed Shadow Ridge High School principal Travis Warnick to more quickly identify which seniors weren’t on track to graduate and enroll them in a credit retrieval course to catch up.

“It will definitely impact our graduation rate,” Warnick said. “We’ll be much more responsive to what our kids need.”

He also assigned a teacher in each department to become an expert in Infinite Campus so they can assist others in the program. It’s helped limit frustrations, he said. Warnick expects the system to be running smoothly next year once teachers have used every aspect of it.

“It is not as intuitive as we’d have hoped, but it is getting better,” Warnick said.

***

After spending time navigating the winding links and pull-down options on the laptop, Wright stumbled upon help videos for Infinite Campus.

It was another item she had been searching for since she started using the program. Though the school has conducted two training sessions, some teachers haven’t been able to attend due to schedule conflicts. If she has time, she plans to watch the videos for help. Sometimes, Wright has learned, figuring out the system requires dumb luck.

But Ebert is confident that in time, teachers and schools won’t know what they ever did without Infinite Campus.

“We’ll look back and we’ll say, ‘Wow, we thought it was tough, but it was definitely worth it,’” Ebert said. “And we needed to do it.”

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