SIS | News

Pascagoula District Moves to Web-Based Student Information, Instructional Management Platforms

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/11/12

A 7,000-student district in Mississippi will be shifting to Pearson Education online products for its student information and learning management needs. Pascagoula School District with 19 schools has chosen Pearson's PowerSchool as its new Web-based student information system (SIS) and Schoolnet for instructional management.

PowerSchool is a Web-based program that provides functions for school administrators, including attendance and discipline management, grades and schedules, state reporting, student record and transcript exchange. It also provides views of the data relevant to teachers, parents, and students. The district reported it expects to have that in place by July 2012.

Schoolnet focuses on classroom activities by helping teachers pull together data related to curriculum, instruction, and assessment and providing analysis and reporting tools. That's expected to be in place later in the summer.

Both systems can be accessed by users through single sign-on and provide data integration.

"Pascagoula School District chose PowerSchool and Schoolnet for many reasons, but primarily because they will let us achieve our vision for a unified and comprehensive student information and academic management system. None of the competitors had the combined capabilities that PowerSchool and Schoolnet offered our district," said Douglas Belk, district IT director. "We're looking forward to a system that allows for a unified login and more modern and appealing features for teachers, students, parents, and administrators, all while providing easy access to reports and results that let us make data-driven decisions."

The two applications are in use at Fort Lee Public Schools in New Jersey, Denver Public Schools in Colorado, and many others.