PowerSchool has followed CMS students through their academic journeys for years, but it will soon be retiring and passing the torch to a new system.
All schools in North Carolina will stop using PowerSchool to keep track of grades during the 2025-2026 school year. Instead they will switch to a new system called Infinite Campus.
Infinite Campus functions similarly to PowerSchool by allowing students to access schedules, check grades and track assignments. It can also function similarly to Canvas, but at this time there are no plans for East Meck to stop using Canvas next year.
The decision to use Infinite Campus was made November 2, 2024 when the North Carolina State Board of Education voted to make the change in order to modernize North Carolina’s student information system.
The transition to Infinite Campus has already begun. About half of the schools in NC made the switch in July 2024. The remaining schools, East included, will switch to the new system in July 2025. Assistant principal Kathryn Bauer talked about what the switch will look like.
“Supposedly, all of the data, not just your course request, but all of your personal information that’s in PowerSchool is going to be copied over to Infinite Campus,” Bauer said. “That’s something that we’ve been working on behind the scenes to make sure that parent names, phone numbers, addresses and all of that is accurate.”
However, there are concerns that things may not go so smoothly. Course registration was done earlier than normal this year so that if student information doesn’t transfer properly to Infinite Campus there will still be time for admin to fix it by hand. In addition, plans are also being put into place to make sure students and parents can access their schedules if login information fails to transfer over.
“I would imagine your student ID and login would be the same, but I’m not sure what that’s going to look like,” Bauer said. “If it’s not the same, then we will have to figure out how we’re going to roll this out to the school. In the past, we’ve just opened schedules up to students. If that is not gonna be a possibility, then we might have to change how we’re doing open houses, where we help people get signed in to Infinite Campus beforehand then they’re able to see their schedule that way.”
PowerSchool has been prone to cyber security breaches in the past and recently discovered a large-scale breach in December 2024. Despite the challenges that will come with the process, Bauer thinks that a lot of positive changes could come from switching to Infinite Campus.
“Infinite Campus I think, has more features than PowerSchool does in terms of scheduling and how it talks to some of the other platforms that we have to make the student experience better,” Bauer said.
Sophomore Jacqueline Serrano Alvarez attends Bryan High School in Nebraska and has been using Infinite Campus since she was in elementary school. She thinks that while Infinite Campus’s graphic design has room for improvement, functionally it’s still a well organized information system.
“I really like how in-depth it is,” Serrano Alvarez said. “I personally don’t like how everything appears as a list. It can be confusing if you haven’t used it before. It just really takes time to get used to.”
The merit of Infinite Campus will be made apparent when East fully integrates it as its new student system. For people like Bauer who will have to work with it often, the hope is that it won’t inherit PowerSchool’s shortcomings.
“I think everybody’s always shocked at the amount of work that I do by hand,” Bauer said. “The system doesn’t just spit out perfect schedules. Someone goes back and has to fix that. But you would think that in 2025 there would be more of a capability for it to be accurate and PowerSchool just doesn’t have that capability. So I’m hoping that Infinite Campus will make my life a lot easier.”
