News and information for staff members and the Madison community
Vol. II No. 5 - February 27, 2007
Q: Is Infinite Campus available to parents yet? I have not received any information on a username or password.
A: (by Kurt Kiefer, Research and Evaluation Services)
It will be at least a few months — meaning into the 2007-08 school
year — until the parent portal will be available to all MMSD parents
and guardians.
We have spent many hours doing the conversion to Infinite Campus from our 18 year old legacy student information system. There has been a large amount of data to move and then all of the data needs to be continually checked for integrity.
The persons who make up a household and the contact information are the most important items. We have to make sure adults and guardians are seeing their students and nothing else! With 25,000 students and many more parents and guardians it takes time.
Also, we just opened up this very new system to staff five months ago, and we feel they must work with it for awhile to get comfortable that they are using it correctly. Most school districts usually wait a year or even two years after staff begin using the system before opening it to parents.
We are a bit more aggressive, and we are hopeful things will go well for us. Each school will be communicating how parents will gain access. There are several legal and technical details, as well, that have to be put into place prior to parent roll out.
The roll out to parents is an important part of our new student information system and we need to ensure it is deployed carefully and meaningfully. If at any point we feel integrity may be comprised by moving too fast with this important component of the overall Infinite Campus system, we will slow implementation to get things under control. Given the importance of student information, we cannot compromise it.
A parent portal work group has been formed and is meeting regularly now. It is composed of staff members and parents, and its goals are to provide recommendations on process and procedure, communications strategies, and general deployment requirements. More information will be available when the work group completes its work in the spring and recommendations are made to the district's management team.
Last Updated: Mon Apr 2 14:44:11 2007
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