District lays out multi-year plan to replace Skyward and ERP systems

Brad Pierce, the district—s director of IT services, briefed the board on a multi-year roadmap to evaluate and migrate Clover Park—s student information system (SIS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms after the vendor signaled an eventual end of the current Skyward SMS 2.0 product.

Pierce said the district is treating the 2029—30 vendor-mandated migration as an opportunity to document requirements carefully rather than rush to a product decision. The first year is focused on discovery and stakeholder-driven requirements gathering with a target to complete stakeholder feedback collection by June 2026 and finalize a validated system profile by August 2026.

The district will post an RFP in late 2026 using the profiles developed in the discovery year, conduct documentation reviews and vendor demos in 2026—27, and present results to the board in March 2027 with a purchase resolution planned for May 2027. The target go-live date is summer 2028; the district plans to run both legacy and new systems in parallel during migration and to emphasize data preparation and staff training.

Board members asked that school nurses and other heavy users be included among stakeholder groups because those users have unique workflow and medical-record needs. Pierce said the stakeholder groups will be assembled through council members and will include representatives of primary system users.

The district stressed that the work now is discovery and documentation, not a vendor selection, and that profiles will help ensure requirements drive procurement rather than sales demonstrations.