Infinite Campus: If I Only Knew

When I started working in School Information Systems (SIS) about six years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. I was tasked with setting up PowerSchool for a school in about a month—learning as I went. At the time, I was diving into the world of charter schools and looking to broaden my expertise. Then, when the school’s SIS coordinator backed out last minute, I stepped up and told them I could get the system up and running. Thankfully, they took a chance on me, and here I am six years later, still working with them—picking up more responsibilities along the way while taking that experience and helping more schools.

But, to be honest, it was more than I anticipated. We had to set up classes, enroll students, reconfigure middle school schedules, learn high school class coding, enter grading systems, configure back-end settings for reports, create attendance and grading policies and procedure, set up gradebooks, and train staff and teachers—all in time for the school year. It meant 12-hour days leading up to the start of school.

So, when the state decided to switch from PowerSchool to Infinite Campus, I thought, “I did this in a month last time, piece of cake.” Of course, and to none of your surprise, that’s not how I look at it now!

While I knew the basic mechanics of SIS, the migration from PowerSchool to Infinite Campus threw me a curveball. No one really knew how the data migration would work, even NCDPI and IC were upfront about it. We were Phase I guinea pigs — and we watched our pilots build the plane as we were buckling up our seat belts. Questions like, “How will IC interact with ECATS?” and “When will the grading standards be uploaded into the system?” were met with, “We aren’t sure yet” and “We hope to know prior to the start of school.”

One of the great challenges was that we only had a couple weeks in the system with our data loaded before being fully cut off from PowerSchool, all while uploading files, attending training, and verifying data. And, oh yeah, still maintaining our old PowerSchool system and closing out the year.

One major issue we quickly realized—though it was too late to fix easily—was how contact information was pulled into the system. It got messy, and the root cause was a huge difference in how PowerSchool and Infinite Campus store data. In PowerSchool, contacts are linked directly to students with specific roles. In Infinite Campus, you have contacts, but also “Households,” which impacts how data functions across the system. Plus, parents created portal accounts in PowerSchool that were then recognized as completely different people in Infinite Campus, leading to hundreds of duplicate records. This issue rippled through the system, and schools are still cleaning it up today.

If I had one piece of advice for schools moving forward: prepare your data in PowerSchool as much as possible before the switch. And for you Phase II folks, don’t worry—you still have time! If you need help, I’m here for you. I know how to fix these issues on the front end, and I can help on the backend too.

Another challenge was figuring out how to run funding reports—especially the ones for the district. We spent a lot of time figuring out which fields were needed and how to pull them correctly. Unfortunately, when I called Infinite Campus or NCDPI, neither had clear answers because IC wasn’t familiar with NC requirements, and NCDPI wasn’t familiar enough with IC.

Lastly, training was a challenge in itself. Training staff and teachers, ensuring they had the right permissions, and making sure everything matched our school’s needs took more time than we anticipated.

All that to say, at WeCharter, I’m here for you. I’m not going to hand you off to an associate. I’m personally working with you to navigate these challenges, resolve them, and create solutions that will set you up for success.