The Westport School District has a new online grading program called PowerSchool.

Bedford is now one of many schools using PowerSchool as its grading program. In fact, it is used by 1,300 school districts, covering 80 percent of school districts in Connecticut, and it has 100 million users.

On its website, PowerSchool’s bills itself as the “#1 leading education technology platform for K-12, serving more than 32 million students, 66 million parents, and 100 million users in over 70 countries around the world.”

For the past several years the district has used eSchool, known to students as Home Access Center. Now Bedford has gone through the trouble of switching to a new program and transporting all of the data that was originally stored in eSchool to PowerSchool.

Because the decision to switch was a district level decision, teachers, administrators, and other staff members were involved in making the decision to switch platforms. According to Mrs. Natalie Carrignan, director of technology, “We had teachers, secretaries, administrators, and tech staff review the product before purchasing it.”

Many students are wondering why Bedford switched programs. According to Mrs. Carrignan, “PowerSchool bought out eSchool. I only knew of three districts in Connecticut that used eSchool, and we have all moved to PowerSchool this year. Since 80 percent of the districts in Connecticut use PowerSchool, the state education office works with the company when new state reports are needed, making it easier on the individual schools.”

Other staff members said similar things about Westport’s reasons for switching. “Powerschool is a comparatively more modern system,” said principal Dr. Adam Rosen, “It has the ability for parents to register students online and update registration information.“

Hopefully this results in students having an easier time checking their grades than they had while using eSchool.

As you can imagine, Westport faced some obstacles while switching. “The amount of data is astronomical, and right now we are using only a fraction of its capabilities. Over the next few years we will continue to customize PowerSchool to our needs,” Dr. Rosen said.

According to Mrs. Carrignan, “eSchool was not problematic. However, many teachers, parents, and administrators said they didn’t like how clunky the program was. Many teachers who taught in other districts and then moved here said they found PowerSchool easier.“

Bedford might have also switched because eSchool is a more expensive program, and its slower acting. Some of the benefits of Powerschool are having a fast program, teachers having more control over daily attendance, and giving teachers more capabilities than Eschool, and having the ability to customize the program to the district’s needs.

Students are also wondering if Powerschool is as user friendly and easy to use as eSchool was.
According to Mrs. Carrignan, “I would say it depends on which you learn first. It is very similar to using an Android phone vs. an iPhone. The same functions are basically in both, but accessed differently. Whichever one you learned first makes more sense and seems easier, especially if you are older. The biggest thing I would say is that learning something so new and so big always takes time and patience.”
According to Dr. Rosen, “Eventually PowerSchool will be more user friendly,; however, right now we are still learning how to use it.”