Park City School District puts in a lot of time and money to make sure that we have this high-tech program to view grades, but is it really that high-tech? PowerSchool is a great and very beneficial application, but the only problem is, it doesn't work! If our grades are loading at two miles per hour, it’s not worth the time to see that your grades haven’t even changed. Also, many times a year PowerSchool shuts down for days at a time for “reconstructing” to “fix the problems”, and when I log back on later it’s just as slow and troublesome as it was three days before. Not only are these technical difficulties a problem for the students, but the teachers as well.
The teachers at the Park City School District can’t load the grades into PowerSchool because it is too slow. PowerSchool constantly shuts down and makes it very difficult for teachers to get anything done. A lot of teachers also don’t know how to use powerschool in certain circumstances. The teachers usually end up having to enter grades manually because canvas doesn’t work like it’s supposed to and doesn’t put the grades into powerschool. In an email, I asked Todd Hauber how much the Park City School District pays for PowersSchool. He said, “The district licenses PowerSchool on an annual basis at a cost of $4.75 per student. This amounts to about $21,000 per year.” This is without paying for the tech people to maintain the system on different servers. So, why are we spending so much money for such a poorly working program?
For the past three years since I’ve had my own computer, the tech support have been trying to make PowerSchool and Canvas work together and transfer grades from one to the other, and while I don’t know how it’s supposed to work, it’s not. If it’s taken three years plus to get two websites to work together, the tech support needs to find a new way to fix it. Overtime there has been little changes to the program, but not enough to fix the difficulties we have everyday with PowerSchool. Day by day teachers are still complaining about 'this' and 'that', and everyday it’s something else that isn’t working right. If PowerSchool doesn’t start working soon, we will need to switch to a new program that will actually benefit our students.
The teachers at the Park City School District can’t load the grades into PowerSchool because it is too slow. PowerSchool constantly shuts down and makes it very difficult for teachers to get anything done. A lot of teachers also don’t know how to use powerschool in certain circumstances. The teachers usually end up having to enter grades manually because canvas doesn’t work like it’s supposed to and doesn’t put the grades into powerschool. In an email, I asked Todd Hauber how much the Park City School District pays for PowersSchool. He said, “The district licenses PowerSchool on an annual basis at a cost of $4.75 per student. This amounts to about $21,000 per year.” This is without paying for the tech people to maintain the system on different servers. So, why are we spending so much money for such a poorly working program?
You are correct. We need a program that works. It's also not just Powerschool, but Canvas is slow as well.
ReplyDeleteThank you for researching the real costs associated with PowerSchool.
ReplyDeleteI agree 100%. Powerschool is a pain.
ReplyDelete