The Eastern Pulaski School Corporation is switching the software for much of its operations, and that will mean some changes for parents. On Monday, the school board approved the purchase of the Skyward Student Management Suite and Financial Suite.
Superintendent Dan Foster says the corporation has been using the Harmony student management system for the past eight years. “Student management just contains, basically, all the student records now,” he explains. “So right now, a teacher can log in and do their grade book in Harmony or student discipline issues or attendance, and some letters can be generated directly from Harmony to send to the parents.” Meanwhile, parents can also log into the system to access that information.
But Foster says the Harmony software has been causing Eastern Pulaski some trouble in recent months, “I would guess probably around 100 help tickets that we’ve submitted since the beginning of this school year to this company.”
He adds the change should also result in a more user-friendly system. “As superintendent, I have to log into the elementary, log out, log into the middle school, log out, log into the high school, just to get attendance rates or something like that. I can’t log in one time and go get that for each school. I have to log in three separate times,” he says. “The teachers and parents will be able to do that, too, especially our teachers who are parents of students we have. There’s a little icon, basically, and the teacher can click on that, and they can go into the ‘family’ mode.”
At the same time, Eastern Pulaski also decided to move to Skyward for its financial system, since its current software was in need of an upgrade. Foster says the school board’s approval of the software purchase came after quite a bit of discussion Monday. “It’s a lot of money,” he says. “It’s a big step to be moving student management systems and a financial system.”
Foster expects the bulk of the changeover to occur over the summer.
