The Minneapolis Public Schools district has shifted its student grading system to Infinite Campus, causing many mixed opinions to arise among students and staff alike. Due to a hacking incident by an organization under the name of Medusa, there was a data breach last year of student information through the student portal. Minneapolis Public Schools claims that “Infinite Campus has advanced software that won’t let you use passwords identified in public data breaches. This helps to keep your account secure.” South students and Staff have mentioned to have had various challenges with the website and some students have shown distaste for the sudden shift of portals.
Ashley Chaves Salgado, a Junior at South High School, said “[The change was] so unnecessary, the portal was perfectly fine.” Louis Baldwin Gould, a Junior at South High School said that Infinite Campus hasn’t been showing his graded work, just his overall class grade, he also feels that the new portal is too complicated. Another student who wished to not be named said that the transition over to Infinite campus and learning how to manage the new portal was challenging for them. They said “It is confusing to navigate, there are more steps than our last portal, and [it’s] overall confusing. I mean I got in, it just took me a month.”
Staff have shown mixed opinions over it such as Uli Loichle, a pre-calc and geometry teacher at South. Loichle mentioned that there is less ability with attendance as teachers used to be able to change the attendance within 3-4 days. However, the new portal makes changing the attendance a 2-person job as now our attendance clerk, office specialists, or counselors have to fix it if a teacher accidentally marks you absent. Loichle stated that she sent an email to parents and students through Infinite Campus however no parents or students received the email. She recalls the teacher’s Infinite Campus training experience.“Our training was about an hour and the training was done at home, so it was online, and the lady would go through the whole thing but we couldn’t do it all at the same time.”
Renee Megney has worked at South High School for 31 years as an office specialist. She works on scheduling and grading for South. Megney believes that Infinite Campus has potential. She said “Anytime you go to a new system there will be problems. So you work all the kinks out till everything’s set up and really ready. I can’t tell you if we really needed to [make the switch], but I can see more on this system than I could on the other system.”
In Megney’s experience, multiple systems had to be used in the past to do the same work that Infinite Campus can do alone. On Infinite Campus she can see everything she needs to see to get her job done without having to use multiple systems at a time. In Megney’s case, “[Infinite Campus] has made it easier to manage everything just in one system.” Although she believes it’s better she understands that change can be difficult for just about anybody. Megney also mentioned that the timing was not ideal. With South being short-staffed there aren’t enough people to troubleshoot problems as quickly as necessary and she sometimes wishes they didn’t touch the system. She also expressed confusion over why Minneapolis Public Schools has had various problems with Infinite Campus as their portal while Saint Paul Public Schools has had fewer problems in their history of using the software as their portal for the past 23 years.
The Minneapolis Public Schools district shifting its student grading system over to Infinite Campus was a difficult and sudden change to the South High School community for both students and staff. The portal change had caused lots of confusion for the South High School community. The usage of infinite campus will be continued in the Minneapolis district and hopefully in the near future the Minneapolis district has an easier time dealing with the new portal.
