Kathy Walsh Nufer notes a PowerSchool success story in a new article for The Post-Crescent . Nufer reports that Wisconsin’s Appleton Area School District has invested US$250,000 in Apple’s PowerSchool student information system after having problems with a competitor’s product. Her comments come in a new article entitled Schools survive technology bomb.
Nufer reports that the Appleton Area School District purchased a US$400,000 system through Canada-based Administrative Assistance Limited.
“We just felt we made a bad decision, it was not meeting our expectations and it would be better to cut our losses and get a new system,” Superintendent Tom Scullen told Nufer.
PowerSchool enables schools to manage everything from attendance to report cards and transcripts using Web browsers. It’s platform agnostic, but it’s based on Apple’s own WebObjects framework. PowerSchool has been around for a while, but Apple acquired the company and the technology earlier this year for US$62 million in stock.
PowerSchool seems to be catching on in Wisconsin after schools located in Kimberly — near Appleton — pioneered its use. Kimberly technology director Michael McDermot told Nufer than 10 to 12 school districts have come to look at Kimberly’s implementation to consider installing it themselves.