St Clair County School System presents…..

1. St Clair County School System presents….. iNOW Implementation Plan

2. This is a State Department mandate. • The State Department of Education divided school systems into 3 Phases for conversion. There were 5 districts in Phase I and 66 districts in Phase II. The St Clair County School District is one of 64 districts in Phase III. • Our planning, data cleanup, and implementation will be continuous throughout the 2010-2011 but the "Go Live" date will be shortly after rollover in June/July 2011. All scheduling and other pre-planning processes for the 2011-2012 school year will be done in the STI Legacy version and converted this summer after rollover. Any data from summer school 2011 will be entered recorded manually and entered into STI INow after the "Go Live" date.

3. InformationNOW is the latest generation of Education Data Management Systems from STI. iNOW is STI’s new, web-based student information system. iNOW will replace STI Office, STI Classroom, STI District Workstation, STI District Enrollment, STI Health and STI Home. • InformationNOW is a centralized, integrated data management system. No longer will each individual school have their "own" STI database. There will be a centralized database server and accessed via the WAN (Wide Area Network). • Even though this will require standardization within the district, each school will still maintain certain autonomy over their data and still be responsible for data entry, etc. for their individual school.

4. http://inow-plan-sccboe.stclaircountyschools.wikispaces.net/

5. iNOW uses a web interface and all of the “legacy’ program (Office, Classroom, and District) will be installed on one centralized server.

6. iNOW will be fully implemented for the 2011-2012 school year. Next school year our entire school system will begin using iNOW

7. Planning of dates and timelines for training and preparing our STI Legacy data for iNOW. • Purchasing of Servers and installation of iNOW program • Pre-Processor – cleaning of data What is the Pre-Processor? We upload our data from all schools to STI. They run the data through a process that tells us which of our data will not convert correctly into InformationNow. This could mean it won’t end up in the new program at all, that it will only partially convert, or that it will create duplicate records. All of these results are considered ‘data errors’. STI ran our data through the initial pre-processor on Oct. 22 resulting in 425 pages of data ‘errors’. The central office and local schools have been working on cleaning these errors on a weekly and monthly time table.

8. Two – Three representatives from each school will be on the initial set up iNOW Team. • These are individuals who has some flexibility in their day to day schedules to attend trainings during the day. • The group will receive initial training from STI. They will then spend time using INow, duplicating everyday tasks currently done in STIOffice. This will allow them to share their experience as mentors to other users in their feeder patterns. They will also help to create all setup files needed by the new program.

9. YES! Training plan is being developed for all STI users based on their role (e.g. Administrators, Counselors, Registrars, Teachers, and Central Office Staff). • The first phase of training will begin in April 2011. Timelines and details will be announced at a later time. • iNOW training videos are available on iNOW-Plan-SCCBOE wiki site along with manuals and on your local school server. • 10 CEU’s are available to all who view the video tutorials at least 4 times before May 2011. Principals will be responsible for submitting names to Central Office. • The SDE will pay for a total of 5 training days per school system. These are divided into 3 days that will happen before the start of school, 1 day after school starts, and 1 day next January (for the first time scheduling in iNOW). • STI limits participation in each of these sessions to 15 participants. This will not be near enough training for our system. Therefore, we will be using a ‘train-the-trainer’ model, which includes administrator trainers, registrar trainers, counselor trainers, and teacher trainers. More information on dates and strategies will follow in the upcoming Countdown to iNOW newsletters.

10. An initial snap shot of our current data will be pulled March 18th. • The snap shot of the iNOW data will be used to restore the settings in iNOW after the “GO LIVE” date. • Attendance, Discipline, Degree, Special Ed, and other codes used by every school • April 6th & 7Th STI rep will be on site to work with the iNOW team to set up certain fields within iNOW. • Attendance, Discipline, Degree, Special Ed, and other codes used by every school. • After the snap shot of our current STI data on March 18th and data fields set up in iNOW this database will become a non –production sandbox. This will be our training data.

11. View iNOW tutorial videos many times. ** This will really help once the initial training begins for iNOW. • Make copies of the iNOW manual guides. • Please make copies or save to server any important data that is currently in STI legacy product. • Timelines must be strictly adhered to in order for conversion to take place prior to the start of school.

12. Scheduling will be completed in the current version of STI (Legacy) and will be converted into iNOW during the final data conversion in July 2011.

13. The Parent Portal (STI Home) is included in iNOW and all schools in our system will have this feature. • Access to the iNOW Parent Portal will be controlled by our System. • The plan now is to not turn this feature on in August 2011 but later in the school year. We want to make sure all school personnel is confident in using iNOW and that our data in iNOW is accurate.

14. We have a very large school system that will require all personnel and every department to be trained. • Each school has its own unique situations that will require some attention to working with iNOW.

15. Assumption is that when a software product is purchased and support is paid, installation is conducted by the said company and that it is a turnkey solution. Reports and communications from the vendor should follow and when thesoftware is ready. Next, the school district should simply switch over and start using the new software. • This assumption has proven FALSE for Phase II school districts thus far. • You will be required to do everything to get this software installed in your district. • You will have to purchase and install the hardware. • You will have to send data for conversion. • You will have to clean data. You will have to resend, and re-clean data. • You will then have to do manual data entry after the data that was cleaned and re-cleaned has be lost in the final conversion. • You will not be given a reason for the lost data.

16. Phase II school system complain that all their student schedules and student data was lost. STI blamed the error on the local school system. This was an incident that happened to several of Phase II school districts. • Mobile County was unable to print report cards –beginning of this school year. • Several Phase II and Phase III school systems met with Dr. Morton to request a hold on the implementation plan for Phase III districts until STI had cleared up all error for Phase II districts. This didn’t happen.

17. A positive attitude may not solve every problem but it makes solving any problem a more pleasant experience.