Student Information Systems

Wisconsin District Gets New SIS After 20 Years With Old System

• By Michael Hart
• 01/29/15

After 20 years with the same student information system (SIS), the fifth-largest school district in Wisconsin is getting a new one.

The Racine Unified School District, with more than 20,000 students in seven towns and 40 schools, turned over a new leaf when it signed on with Infinite Campus to put the new SIS, Infinite Campus District Edition, in place by summer 2015.

"Every stakeholder who attended the Infinite Campus demo liked the system's very contemporary interface and that it's easy to navigate," said James DePue, student and instructional systems data supervisor for the district.

Among the new features that the Racine district will be getting with the new system is Cloud Choice Hosting, which DePue said he and others believe will ensure more data security than its previous SIS, whose vendor outsourced hosting to a third party.

"It just became too challenging to pull necessary data from the system," DePue said. "We run more than 40 exports daily and report querying was very slow because of limited bandwidth."

As part of the package, Racine will be getting a new online registration system that DePue said he expects will save the district money and a Data Health Check feature intended to clean data and identify training needs.

"If we see data-related issues popping up in a department or building, we can immediately direct those users to tutorials," DePue said.