Skyward, a K-12 school administrative software provider, is excited to further its partnership with Duncanville Independent School District. Located southwest of Dallas, the district of 13,075 students adopted Skyward’s School Business Suite in January 2015 and recently transitioned to the company’s Student Management Suite, after a rocky experience with its former SIS vendor.
Kyle Berger, CTO at Duncanville ISD, described challenges the district faced with its previous SIS and how the needed transition came about. “Over time, as with many products, we had to make internal adaptations to issues within the software,” Berger says. “As we started to look to the future in regards to more robust offerings and interoperability, we began to see issues emerge.”
When the district’s previous SIS vendor issued an update of its software last summer, Duncanville ISD administrators encountered a number of problems affecting district operations. “Unfortunately for us this was not a very good experience,” Berger says. “All levels within the organization were affected by product issues, lacking support ability, and constant updates leading to reoccurring outages.”
Duncanville ISD’s tenure with the SIS provider would soon come to an end. “The overall lack of local support, account presence onsite, and a true understanding of their own product’s issues led us to this crossroad,” Berger says. “For the first time in 15 years, we had a decision to make regarding our district’s future SIS direction.”
The district gathered input from an SIS selection committee of more than 60 staff members and parents as Duncanville ISD considered its options. Administrators then turned to the district’s current ERP provider, Skyward, and explored the firm’s award-winning SIS solution.
“One glaring thing that made Skyward stand out was that you did not get nickeled and dimed for every little piece of the program,” Berger says. “With our prior solution, if you wanted mobile app access it would cost you. If you wanted an admin application for staff members, that would cost you. Every time you needed something there was an extra cost. With Skyward, the core package as a whole contained everything we had wanted in our past program.”
Duncanville ISD administrators confidently selected and transitioned to Skyward’s Student Management Suite in January 2016. The adoption of the SIS has allowed the district to fully integrate student and business management information across the board, leaving stakeholders satisfied with the end result.
“Our migration to Skyward’s School Business Suite set a very strong tone of confidence within our district,” Berger says. “The project management, constant communication, and training team gave our district such a smooth transition that any concerns associated with such a move on the student management side was a non-issue.”
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