By Sarah Glidden

The district will be switching over from iPass to PowerSchool at the start of second semester because people felt iPass wasn’t meeting the needs of the school system. The new program, PowerSchool, will be the new way to access grades and stay up to date on important announcements.

“It was decided by the district that iPass wasn’t meeting the needs of the schools, so a committee was created of teachers from all the schools in the district,” Principal Evan Bishop said.

The new program will bring many new features and changes to make accessing grades and other information more user-friendly and convenient.

“You can get it on an app on your phone. It also is going to allow you to print out reports and is a better way for teachers and administration to communicate with students and send messages,” Bishop said.

Another big factor to this new system is there will no longer be monthly progress reports. Instead, grades will always be open for students to access, something that many students have been asking for and see as a large benefit.   

While this program is used widely throughout the United States and was seen as the best option by the committee created, there are still concerns of how well the program will work.

“There are a bunch of people working behind sense to troubleshoot,” said Bishop, who is hoping the transition from iPass to PowerSchool will go smoothly.

The other schools is the district including the Middle School break the school year into trimesters or quarters ending in mid-December. For this reason they have already switched over to PowerSchool.

“The other schools have already transitioned, so we are learning from their issues,” Bishop said.

In preparation for the change of programs, there is going to be class meetings in the beginning of second semester to help students figure out how to use PowerSchool. Students can also expect tutorial videos to be emailed out.

Scheduling for next year will also be delayed in order to give more time to students to figure out how to use PowerSchool before class requests are due.

While problems are not expected, students should not hesitate to go to the technology center, Mr. Hass, or Mrs. Henderson if they have questions or problems.