January 31, 2014
TO
Superintendents
FROM
Philip W. Price
HOME BASE – UPDATES
In November, I wrote you a letter providing a broad overview of our progress to date with Home Base,
and this letter is an update to share where things stand today. Implementation of Home Base, and all of
its component parts, has been on an aggressive timeline since the beginning for a variety of educational,
contractual and financial reasons. Even before July 2013 when we formally switched over to
PowerSchool, you and your teams have worked very hard and handled a number of difficulties to
integrate existing state, federal, third party, and local district systems with new tools and practices.
Your dedicated team along with the NC Department of Public Instruction team and our vendor partners
continue to make the success of Home Base a priority.
On Tuesday, February 4, we will begin weekly webinar updates for Superintendents. In this first
webinar, we will go over the calendar for future software updates and releases. The invitation and login details for the webinar were emailed to you on Tuesday, January 28. I hope you will participate on
February 4 and in the brief update webinars that will happen weekly thereafter.
Status of Software Fixes
Many of the solutions we need to install are still in development. We do recognize that some of our
installed fixes have encountered problems. Until we get these items effectively implemented we have
identified short-term fixes. Long-term solutions are a priority and we expect some to be delivered in
February. We will update you on the status of software fixes in our weekly webinars.
Status of Data Conversion
As you all know, data conversion presented significant challenges as we moved all the data for current
students from NC WISE to PowerSchool under a tight timeline. We continue to work closely with your
teams to identify and correct invalid/set up data. While we have developed tools using queries, scripts,
re-imports and communications for procedural cleanup at the local level, our best resource is your
school level employees, who are keeping us informed of these issues. We will continue to make this
clean-up effort a priority for as long as it takes to get all data correct.
OFFICE OF FINANCIAL, BUSINESS, AND TECHNOLOGY SERVICES
Philip W. Price, Chief Financial/Chief Information Officer | Philip.Price@dpi.nc.gov
6326 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, North Carolina 27699-6326 | (919) 807-3600 | Fax (919) 807-3604
AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EMPLOYER
Home Base - Updates
January 31, 2014
Page 2
Status of System Performance
System performance and reliability are much improved for PowerSchool, and additional server and
processing capacity have been added to improve Schoolnet performance. Pearson and the NCDPI have
implemented performance monitoring tools to keep a close watch on system performance. We will
continue to use this process of monitoring and adjusting infrastructure and software until you have the
performance level that is acceptable.
There has been solid progress cleaning up data, fixing bugs, providing enhancements, and pushing out
new features as they become available.
Bullet List of other Accomplishments
PowerSchool
•
Principals Monthly Report (PMR ) fixes - Currently going through NCDPI quality assurance (QA)
testing. We expect the new release (set for the 2/7 maintenance weekend) to be a significant
improvement over earlier releases.
•
In addition to PMR , the following items, which had previously identified issues, will also be
addressed in the 2/7 maintenance weekend:
o
Academically and Intellectually Gifted (AIG) Data Collection
o
Dropout Data Collection and Validation
•
Student Transfers across districts - Currently in NCDPI QA.
•
Student Historical Grades - Records with a negative school ID are now corrected and in Production
(corrects a previous problem with eTranscripts encountered by Charter Schools).
•
Course Number and Course Name - Added a process to auto-restore the Course Number and
Course Name in production to previous values (if the user had previously deleted).
•
NC Transcript Fix - Corrected an issue where total saved credits were not showing correctly in the
transcript performance section. Newly saved credits will now be recognized correctly in
production.
•
Auto-Dialer (Emergency Contact List) - Alternative solution to provide student emergency contact
information currently in NCDPI QA.
•
Athletic Eligibility – Delivered a work-around for Athletic Eligibility as a stop gap until this feature
is ready.
Educator Evaluation and Professional Development

Log-Ins – Provided direct login access to the Educator Evaluation and Professional Development
systems, which allows end-user to access the system without logging in through PowerSchool.
This new feature has enabled LEAs to continue to use the Educator Evaluation System whenever
they encountered issues with PowerSchool single sign on (SSO) and when PowerSchool was down
for maintenance.
Home Base - Updates
January 31, 2014
Page 3

Professional Development Tool Pilot #1 – Completed a successful pilot of the Professional
Development tool by delivering the course, Introduction to Universal Design and Learning through
the Professional Development system platform to a group of registered students. A second pilot
begins on February 2 and runs through March 2014 followed by general rollout of the Professional
Development System to all LEAs.
Schoolnet
•
Pearson continues to work on resolutions to the sluggish performance issues many LEAs are
experiencing. Schoolnet production will be brought down at 5:00 p.m. on Friday, January 31,
2014, and will be back up by 6:00 a.m. on Monday, February 3, 2014. Pearson is implementing a
change that we anticipate will address the sluggish response times.
•
In response to various reported performance and reliability issues, Pearson has assembled a large
team of application architects and specialists and has begun a very methodical analysis of Schoolnet
system performance. Many LEAs reported improved Schoolnet performance during the week of
January 13, 2014. Additional issues were addressed during the week of January 20, and
performance has improved significantly since early January. End-users will see incremental
improvements over the next few months until system performance and availability complies with
our Service Level Agreement.
•
Continued rolling out OpenClass to LEAs in waves. To date, 19 of the LEAs in waves 1 and 2 are
currently live and can actively use their Home Base OpenClass site. As of January 24, 2014, 43
LEAs in waves 1 and 2 have been trained on OpenClass, and we are now beginning wave 3 rollout.
Home Base Support Center (HBSC)
•
New Regional Support Model – Regional personnel added to provide additional support. These
people will constitute mini-support teams of both Pearson and HBSC staff. Pearson regional
support staff (IPMs) have already been assigned and HBSC staff assignments as primary contacts to
specific regions are in process. Additional changes are planned to restructure and reconfigure call
menus, call routing, the Remedy ticketing system, and staffing models to fully support this regional
model.
•
Staff and Process Alignment – Staff coverage fine-tuned to better meet current load demands.
Improved process to respond to tickets more quickly. Goal: respond to any customer service
request within a maximum of two business days. Customers are assigned a specific Support Center
agent and ticket priorities are assigned based on impact and severity.
•
Pearson on-site Support and Assistance – Starting in January, Pearson provides an onsite support
representative available inside the HBSC to provide additional expertise. This facilitates more
timely resolution of issues requiring deeper product knowledge, reduces issues escalated to Pearson
technical support, and directly transfers knowledge to HBSC staff.
We again want to thank you and your staff for going beyond the call of duty to make Home Base a
success. We still have some hurdles to clear, but we are getting closer.
PWP/tm