Wisconsin District Gets New SIS After 20 Years With Old System

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.

About the Author

Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.

Featured

  • futuristic AI interface with glowing data streams and abstract neural network patterns

    OpenAI Launches Its Largest AI Model Yet

    OpenAI has introduced GPT-4.5, its largest AI model to date, code-named Orion. The model, trained with more computing power and data than any previous OpenAI release, is available as a research preview to select users.

  • Slooh Earth Science Quests

    New Slooh Earth Science Curriculum Features Live Orbital Satellite Feeds

    Robotic telescope platform and astronomy education provider Slooh has launched a new NGSS-aligned Earth Science curriculum for grades 5-9 designed for Earth science and career and technical education IT courses.

  • A geometric pattern of open Chromebook computers with bold outlines, subtle shading, and soft gradients, spaced evenly with vibrant green and blue accents on a neutral background.

    Challenges and Opportunities Ahead for the 'Great Chromebook Refresh'

    During the pandemic, the education community scrambled to provide students with laptops to promote online learning equity and mitigate learning loss. Today, those devices are approaching the end of their useful lives — and a "great Chromebook refresh" has been predicted as schools seek to replace them with newer models.  

  • stacks of glowing digital documents with circuit patterns and data streams

    Mistral AI Intros Advanced AI-Powered OCR

    French AI startup Mistral AI has announced Mistral OCR, an advanced optical character recognition (OCR) API designed to convert printed and scanned documents into digital files with "unprecedented accuracy."