The switch to a new state-mandated student management system contributed to four Bentonville campuses being put on state probation for overbooking some classes and assigning too many students to one high school teacher.
The new system was fraught with challenges, which not only affected class sizes but also reporting grades and producing transcripts, said Dena Ross, executive director of instructional services for the Bentonville district. The system has improved with refinements from the state, Ross said.
Bentonville staff havemore experience with the system, and school officials know what steps to take should any more glitches arise.
“We made a few mistakes,” Ross said. “We hate it. We will do all we can to make sure we don’t let it happen again.”
Schools and school districts face serious penalties if they violate accreditation standards one more year, whether the violation is the same or a different violation.
The Bentonville School District is among 43 districts across the state that have implemented eSchoolPlus, an online student management system districts use to share student data with the Arkansas Department of Education, said Carmen Jordan, division manager of student applications for the Arkansas Public School Computer Network.
Another 74 school districts are due to go live with eSchoolPlus in 2013-14. By 2014-15, all districts, charter schools and education service cooperatives using state-provided software will use eSchoolPlus.
The law requires districts to use either the state-provided software or to have a system that is compatible with the state’s network, said Jim Boardman, assistant commissioner for the department’s Division of Research and Technology.
Officials for the Bentonville, Pulaski County Special School District and Fort Smith School District said the new system provides some benefits, but they encountered challenges during the transition.
OLD SYSTEM OBSOLETE
The switch is necessary because eSchoolPlus’ predecessor, StudentPlus, is nearing the end of its shelf life, Jordan said. SunGard K-12 Education, based in Bethlehem, Penn., developed eSchoolPlus as an upgraded product for managing student information.
With eSchoolPlus, all information entered must be correct for the system to work properly and to avoid errors, Jordan said. A missed prompt in a master schedule, for example, could cause a problem producing report cards.
“Some of the issues that Bentonville encountered were issues that were specific to them,” Jordan said. “For Pulaski County, their learning curve was much steeper because they were not on StudentPlus software.”
Last year, schools in Bentonville weren’t able to create student schedules until the first day of school because of the switch to eSchoolPlus,Ross said. School officials had difficulty building a master schedule in the new system, which must be in place for the system to generate individual student schedules, she said.
Student schedules were “wildly incorrect,” with only one class on a schedule or with no math class or with three study hall periods. Weeks passed before everystudent was in the right class, Ross said.
By October, when the state department pulls information to check compliance with class sizes and student loads for teachers, Bentonville High School was still working with the system to remove duplicate students and “phantom” students, Ross said.
High school off icials thought classes were in compliance after manually checking teacher rosters and attendance, but the state network showed the school was out of compliance, Ross said.
State standards limit most high school classes to 30 students and teachers to no more than 150 students in a day, said John Hoy, assistant commissioner in the division of public school accountability. Bentonville High School had 32 students in an upper-level math class, 31 students in a world history class and 31 students in a chemistry class. An oralcommunications teacher had 152 students.
At Bright Field, Old High and Ruth Barker middle schools, which serve grades five and six, principals for years had enrolled up to 30 students in music and art classes and were never before placed on probation, Ross said. With the change to the new system, the principals could not check against the state’s records to determine exactly how many students were in those classes as of Oct. 1.
The middle schools exceeded the state limit of 28 students with 30 students in art and music classes, Hoy said.
The high school now has an alternate method of checking the teachers’ student loads, and the district is locking class sizes and student loadsso the system won’t take any students over the state caps, Ross said.
“It’s our mistake,” Ross said. “It’s much more manageable. This can’t happen again. It won’t.”
The high school already has run the first round of student schedules for the new school year and has started making revisions, Ross said.
ERRORS HAPPEN
The Pulaski County Special School District went from using a “user-friendly” Pearson software to the system provided by the state in 2010-11, said Sharon Berry, the district’s assistant director of information technology applications. The Pearson software cost $750,000 to upgrade, and the state software was free for the district to use.
With eSchoolPlus, district staff members have learned that everyone must enter correct information at each stage, Berry said. The course catalog has to be correct to build a master schedule. The master schedule has to be correct to generate student schedules. Each piece affects grades, attendance and transcripts.
The system won’t generate a transcript without a gradepoint average record.
“Schedule changes were a lot more difficult,” she said.
Problems still arise, but the schools’ staff have continued to receive training and are more adept at working with the system, Berry said. Berry’s experience over three years of working with eSchoolPlus has aided her in diagnosing problems in student records.
Errors are going to happen with 36 registrars and 40 counselors entering student data, Berry said.
“We don’t really have asmany problems as we did when we first started,” she said.
GPA PROBLEMS
The Fort Smith School District switched at the same time as Bentonville, said Ginni Mc-Donald, principal of Northside High School. The new system has some advantages because it joins the student management system with an electronic grade book. Staff members no longer have to copy information from the grade book into the state system.
The high school encountered problems after running the first round of report cards in October 2012, she said. In some cases, grade-point averages were not calculated correctly.
The high school staff took steps to ensure the report cards were accurate before they were distributed. They had to repeat that process for subsequent report cards, she said.
In some cases, the system produced incorrect transcripts that had to be corrected, she said. When students were concerned about meeting a college deadline, staff members were able to work with the college, student and parents to make sure the problems didn’t affect their admission or applying for a scholarship, McDonald said.
Implementing a new system requires patience during the adjustment period, she said.
“It’s just about learning a new way,” she said.
As more districts begin using the new system for the 2013-14 school year, it will stretch Jordan and her staff of four. The division operated with Jordan and three workers last school year, but her office plans to hire a fourth person in anticipation of a higher call volume.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 07/06/2013