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DeWitt Public School District

DeWitt Schools wanted a modern Web-based SIS that would provide a comprehensive set of integrated tools.

DeWitt, Michigan

2,979 Students

DeWitt Schools, located in the heart of Michigan and serving nearly 3,000 students, was looking for a new student information system (SIS) to replace the stalwart CIMS system they had outgrown.

Because they serve a tech-savvy community with a high percentage of online households, DeWitt Schools wanted a modern Web-based SIS that would provide a powerful, community-wide database and comprehensive set of integrated tools to support their many business processes. They found what they needed with Infinite Campus.

Challenges
During their years with CIMS, DeWitt Schools enjoyed the reliability of a venerable system and, once learned, the speed of navigation among its main screens. However, DeWitt faced many of the training and information management difficulties associated with legacy information systems that aren’t fully integrated or Web-based.

As Sherry McVay, director of technology for Dewitt Schools said, “Our biggest concern was the fact that CIMS became outdated and required a great deal of work to export data in a useful format. The interface was difficult to teach new users who now expect a graphical interface. We had secretaries who needed to design and run their own queries, but they weren’t able to do this work without assistance from the system administrator. We needed to get more direct data access to our users and CIMS didn’t provide that ability.”

Solution
After a thorough review of available SIS and their underlying technologies, DeWitt Schools decided Infinite Campus was the company with the best technology and vision to meet their current and future needs.

“One of the reasons we went with Infinite Campus,” McVay points out, “is because we saw we were paying for more and more data management time for someone to collect, aggregate and put information into formats for people to understand. CIMS was not that flexible and it felt like our data was captive to the one or two people who could do this work. Now that Infinite Campus is in place, everyone who needs to work with the data has their customized level of access and can take advantage of reporting options that fit their needs.”

“Our state has put into place some very demanding pupil accounting requirements that simply could not be met without the ability to extract customized data quickly,” McVay elaborates. “Infinite Campus has worked hard to support our specific-state needs with the required reports.”

With Infinite Campus, data is entered once and used across the district. This real-time information eliminates errors associated with duplicate data entry and allows authorized stakeholders - administrators, clerical staff, teachers, parents, and students - to immediately access the information they need in the formats they desire via easy-to-use, Web-based tool sets.

“Administrators have a greater ability to review student data then they ever were able to with CIMS,” McVay says. “Bringing up demographics and grade information quickly allows staff to assist students in general, as well as during an emergency situation. Our secretaries are able to create their own extracts and that saves them time. The information available to teachers is immediate as opposed to data that has been pushed down from another system. Parents can access ongoing information directly in the system as opposed to day-old data that has been imported from CIMS. And students can access their information from anywhere.”

Results
Supporting an Engaged Learning Community, DeWitt Schools recognizes that systematic change is underway in public education. They understand that their adoption of Infinite Campus is an essential step toward effectively using data to inform decision making, provide more individualized learning, and more fully involve parents and students in educational processes.

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