Located in north central Wisconsin, Lakeland Union High School District serves more than 700 students from five feeder schools. Lakeland had been using PowerSchool for their student information system (SIS), but was looking for a new system to streamline student administration and personalize learning.
Atop Lakeland’s wish list in a new SIS vendor was local support and training. They selected Infinite Campus, in part because it’s supported by the Wisconsin Regional Computer Centers (WiRCC), which provide implementation and support services on behalf of vendors.
“We heard other vendors might not have a great support center like WiRCC. We’ve worked with WiRCC in the past and appreciate their support, so I knew Infinite Campus would be the best fit for our district,” said Weldon.
Lakeland kicked off implementation in March of 2014 and 99% of their data transferred to Infinite Campus during the first data conversion. “Implementation was wonderful,” said Weldon. “We had such good support from Infinite Campus staff. We met weekly to do health checks on everything and to review the process step by step.”
Favorite Features
Weldon said reporting is one of the biggest improvements with Infinite Campus compared to PowerSchool. The integrated and specialized Ad Hoc reporting tool allows Lakeland to export custom reports. With Infinite Campus, Lakeland can create static and dynamic lists of students and add functions to filter for optimal sorting. In addition, reports can be exported into various formats for stakeholder review.
“You can structure what information you want pulled,” said Weldon. “Instead of canned reports, we’re able to select the specifics for what we want queried. It’s also easier to correct errors than with our previous system. We used to have to call support and ask them to go in and change a report; now we can do a lot of that ourselves.”
Local Support
Infinite Campus’ partnership with WiRCC continues to be a helpful and valuable aspect for Lakeland. WiRCC has three convenient locations and offers affordable training, professional implementation and support to districts statewide.
“It’s important to have good support, instead of waiting a couple of days for a fix,” said Weldon.
Lakeland appreciates the ongoing communication they receive from WiRCC. Anytime WiRCC performs updates, they notify the district and provide any necessary instructions for the users. “Our legacy system would make updates without notifying us. We would realize something wasn’t working correctly, and we’d have to place a call to support to find out what they did,” said Weldon.
Cafeteria Operations
Lakeland decided to implement Campus Food Service to help streamline cafeteria operations and improve efficiency for food service employees. Food Service is an optional Premium Product that seamlessly integrates with Infinite Campus’ core system. Weldon explained how it’s made life easier for parents: “We didn’t have a lunch program with our previous SIS because it wasn’t as comprehensive as we needed. With Campus Food Service, parents and guardians have a one-stop shop and can easily get the information they need.”
