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Lake Central warns parents of rocky start as district migrates IEPs to PowerSchool program
Summary
The district said teachers lost access to the prior online IEP/ILP system on June 6 and training for the new PowerSchool special programs has been limited; staff forecast a difficult start to the school year for special-education paperwork and parent access.
Lake Central’s director of student services warned the school board on July 14 that the district’s mandated migration to PowerSchool’s IEP/ILP platform will cause service and access disruptions early in the school year.
“Parents are going to see both a different paper copy when we start holding conferences, so we'll have to walk through that with them,” Director of Student Services Gormala told the board. “...we are just gonna need some patience from everybody, because it is going to be a learning curve for all of us when we start school.”
Gormala said the Indiana Department of Education changed the state-supported provider and that the district lost access to its previous online IEP/ILP platform on June 6. Training for teachers began in April but, she said, initial training sessions did not give teachers a clear sense of what the new program would look like in daily use. Administrators received additional training focused on reporting options.
The district expects the new system to open for local access “as of Friday,” when technology staff and administrators will begin provisioning teacher accounts and Office Hours and help-desk support will be available, Gormala said. She noted principals and general-education teachers have not received full access yet and the district will need to provide additional training and parent-facing materials for conferences and document signatures.
Gormala described specific issues this summer: teachers could not retrieve older IEP records after the statewide platform was taken offline, leaving some historical records unavailable until the district can populate the new system. She said one parent requested an IEP document that the district could no longer access online and that some paper records had been destroyed under normal retention policies.
The district’s next steps, as described to the board, are to provision staff accounts when the new system opens, offer help-desk and office-hour support, train principals and general-education teachers on access needs, and prepare new paper copies and a parent portal walkthrough for upcoming conferences. No formal board vote or expenditure was recorded for the transition during the July 14 meeting; the presentation was informational and board members offered encouragement and questions.
Gormala said many special-education staff are eager to begin using the new system and the district anticipates some “hiccups” and a learning curve early in implementation.
