Officials at Naperville North and Central High Schools are busy creating a master schedule for all their student classes next fall, a process that is time-consuming but typically comes together without a hitch.
This year, it is downright nerve-racking.
That is because Naperville School District 203 has installed a new computer operating system in all their schools, which tracks every record from grades and discipline to attendance and class rosters.
The startup of the new system, which was intended to streamline school record keeping, has done little to inspire confidence among the school staff who rely on it. The problems that have plagued the conversion also have trickled down to the parents and students, who have complained about delayed report cards and incomplete transcripts.
“We’ve had difficulty all year long. … It has just been constant,” said Naperville Central Principal Tom Paulson.
Although the system crashes have affected every school in the district, the problems have been particularly severe at the high school level because of the complexity of record keeping. And though the worst of the problems hit during the fall, teachers said they are frustrated because the system still is not reliable after almost a year.
The new system also was supposed to simplify the attendance and grading records this year, allowing teachers to enter the information onto their laptop computers instead of filling out forms that are sent to the main office. But this change will not kick in until the system is working properly.
Skip Paulson, the district’s director of technological services, said his staff has spent many hours during the year trying to iron out the bugs in the new software. But most of the problems were caused by the fact that the district had to send all its data to a computer server in Minnesota, because the district’s server initially could not handle the new software. Sending all the data to Minnesota caused frequent delays and sometimes crashed the system.
“There are things you would like to do differently,” Paulson said. “But conversions are hard. . . . Everyone is getting used to a whole new system.”
Sometime this summer, the system will be transferred to the district’s server. And that is why the high school administrators are a little nervous about building a master schedule from scratch this spring, because all the data will be moved during the transfer. And no one knows whether this will come off as expected.
“It’s almost like going through a second conversion,” Principal Tom Paulson said.
