UCPS says Infinite Campus conversion complete after yearlong rollout; parent portal, fee payments now live

Union County Public Schools officials reported Sept. 24 that the district has completed its yearlong conversion from PowerSchool to the Infinite Campus student-information system, a change they said improved data security, streamlined operations and gave families direct online access to grades and fees.

District technology lead Jay Parker told the committee that the transition involved running PowerSchool and Infinite Campus in parallel for roughly a year to validate data and ensure the new system populated required fields correctly. "This journey has taken a year," Parker said. "We had to sanitize 7,000 records and bring them over," and the work included standing up an online registration and a parent portal that provides grades, assignments, unofficial transcripts, attendance and class rank.

The conversion also included integrations Parker said were essential to daily operations: a new student information feed for school nutrition so students can be served meals with correct account balances; transportation feeds so bus routes and rider assignments transfer properly; and a Canvas learning-management integration that passes back grades. Parker said the district added a fee module that allows parents to pay technology and other school fees through the parent portal and automatically updates the Infinite Campus records, reducing duplicate bookkeeping.

Parker described a formal project plan with quarterly milestones and weekly "just-in-time" trainings for staff. He said the district learned from earlier pilot districts and intentionally delayed joining a pilot program to observe others' mistakes. "We broke this up into 12 milestones into 4 quarters," Parker said, and credited a project manager and three student-information coordinators who provided regular communications and open labs for data managers.

Board members praised the staff. "Kudos to Jay and his team," Dr. Houlihan said during the meeting, adding that leadership and skilled staff were central to the conversion's success. Committee members said they would solicit additional feedback from advisory councils: Parker and others said the district will prioritize stakeholder input from high school, parent and teacher advisory councils in the coming weeks.

District staff said the rollout focused first on stabilizing the student-information system and that additional Infinite Campus modules (analytics, workflow, check-in/check-out and optional payment/store modules) will be evaluated and implemented after the district passes its 40th day of school if business needs are confirmed. The technology update will be provided to the full board for information.