Computing ills confront school district.

Byline: Anne Williams The Register-Guard

True to her techie nature, Mary Ditson was delighted at the prospect of a new, whiz-bang student data system for the Eugene School District.

"I'm really a Pollyanna kind of technology person," said Ditson, the technology coordinator and a teacher at South Eugene High School. "I love everything. I see how things are going to work. I'm pretty good at figuring things out."

But the electronic Student Information System, called "eSIS" for short, has tested even Ditson's considerable skills and good humor.

There's little question the district needed to scrap its antiquated record-keeping system, Ditson said, but she's afraid officials made a bad choice in January 2002 when they signed on for the $1 million eSIS.

"This particular product was not ready for prime time," she said.

Ditson is one of many district employees who have found the first weeks with eSIS challenging at best. The system, designed to track and record student registration data, class schedules, attendance, grades, disciplinary actions, special education plans and much more, is enormous, complicated and - according to some in the district - substantially more difficult to use than expected.

The timing didn't help. The district made the switch over the summer, on the heels of the latest in a series of painful cuts in staffing and programs. The district trimmed 17 teaching jobs last year, and this year took the ax to the central office, cutting 18 positions, two of those in the computing and information services department.

District administrators say the potential of eSIS is awesome. The system - the choice of an increasing number of school districts in Oregon, including Portland, Bend-LaPine, Beaverton, Springfield, Coos Bay and Multnomah County - will help the district keep up with government's growing hunger for student data. And in the long run, they say, it will save valuable time and money.

But those promises have done little to smooth the bumps in recent weeks.

Churchill High School Principal John Sappington, who remains a strong supporter of the decision to go with eSIS, said it was clear even before school started that the district had bitten off more than it could chew.

"I think probably the biggest mistake that was made was underestimating the size and capacity of this program," he said. "It's not a program, it's programs. Everything you think it can do, it can do that and probably 10 times more."

Grading function panned

For Churchill, the trouble started right off the bat with student class scheduling. Even though key staff members had undergone training, it didn't translate well to real life, Sappington said, partly because of the school's uniquely complex course schedule. Frustrated administrators and counselors eventually gave up on eSIS, though they'll try again next term after more training.

"People had to work day and night to basically hand-make schedules for every kid," he said. "We lost a lot of time." When Mary Ditson attended the first eSIS training sessions last spring, she quickly realized eSIS would strain the district's ability to cope. But she dove right in, determined to make the transition as easy for her and her colleagues as possible.

"I try to lead the way, be lighthearted about everything, 'We love eSIS to pieces,' that sort of thing," said Ditson, who posted handy "cheat sheets" for numerous eSIS functions on South Eugene's Web site.

And she found things she liked.

"The night before school started, I sat there at my computer and read about my students," she said. "I could see if they were new to the country, if they had two parents. It was great."

Ditson also found taking attendance on eSIS easier than the old pencil-to-paper, send-in-to-the-office method, although many of her colleagues say it adds to their workload.

Then she launched into the "Gradebook" module, which teachers can use to track assignments and compute grades. That was the turning point for her.

"For teachers, the grade book is a pretty essential thing - it's kind of a sacred document," she said. The eSIS Gradebook, she said, "is ugly. It's full of bugs, it's not easy to use, it's really a bad product."

Les Moore, the district's head of computing and information services, said Gradebook is causing the most headaches, followed by attendance-taking. "Right now, to be real honest about it, I don't think the Gradebook part is as strong as it should be," said Moore, who said he's working with eSIS's makers, Ontario-based AAL, to fix the glitches. "That's a nice way of putting it."

A few teachers like it. More than half of North Eugene High School's teachers are using Gradebook, for example. But many who gave it a try, including Ditson, have returned to their old computer grading programs, which were separate from the centralized system.

"When I finally decided not to use (eSIS), it felt like I had stood up in an abusive relationship and said, 'No more!' " Ditson said.

Hardware hardships

Churchill English teacher Wes Flinn said he finds Gradebook and other eSIS functions cumbersome, partly because of school hardware that's not up to the task. He wished the district had opted for a "practice year" before plunging ahead.

"I love the idea and I see the potential," he said, "but the reality is it's just not there yet."

Several Oregon districts that have signed on with eSIS, including Springfield, haven't yet rolled it out. Others, such as Bend-LaPine, are further along than Eugene.

"We're in our third year now, and I can remember what the first year was like," Don Fisher, Bend's director of technology, said with a laugh.

Bend-La Pine had minimal lead time for training, he said, and the first year was tough.

"We still have issues in our district," he said. "But I think basically people have learned how to use the system and are comfortable with it. ... There are so many different things that we can do now and do efficiently."

Grading, however, is not yet among them. Unhappy with the Gradebook module, nearly all teachers opted to stay with their old programs, he said.

While Eugene was able to save money by sharing training and start-up costs with other districts, Superintendent George Russell guessed that ultimately eSIS will cost a bit more than the $1 million budgeted over its first four years, perhaps for additional training as well as new hardware.

"The total dollars at this point have not been exceeded, but we are spending money that was planned to be spent next year," he said.

Russell said every new software program he's worked with in schools has gotten off to a rocky start, though he acknowledged that the magnitude of the changes and challenges with eSIS proved greater than anticipated. Still, he said he's heartened by what other districts tell him.

"What I'm hearing is they've had some glitches as well, but see real promise in the product," he said.

While outdated hardware is still making eSIS maddeningly slow for some Eugene district employees, most of the problems with specific functions - namely scheduling and attendance - have been ironed out, thanks in part to the marathon hours pulled by district technicians, Moore said.

Looking to the future

Because of budget constraints, Moore said he simply wasn't able to devote as much employee time to eSIS as it deserved. Nor was he able to keep elements of the old system running alongside the new, as some districts have done, to allow a more gradual phase-in.

Moore and others also said the training from AAL, the Burlington, Ontario-based company that developed eSIS, "could have been better."

But he remains enthusiastic and optimistic about eSIS and its capabilities.

"Right now I wish I had something smaller and simpler," he said, "but down the road, in the long run, this will be much better than what we've had in the past."

John Sappington commended Moore and his crew, as well as his own staff at Churchill, for their determination to work out the kinks and forge ahead.

"The thing we don't want to happen is for people to get so discouraged they throw up their hands and say, 'This isn't working,'" he said. "This really is going to be beneficial for our students and staff."

CAPTION(S):

E d u c a t i o n E x t r a Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard Mary Ditson, technology coordinator at South Eugene High School, says she loves to tackle new computer programs, but aspects of the school district's $1 million eSIS system aren't up to par. Ditson and other teachers have reverted to their previous method of computing grades. INSIDE Faces and Places: A look at Briggs Middle School in Springfield / B4