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Ferndale School District WESPaC Information Page

WSIPC Enhanced Skyward Point and Click

WSIPC is in the process of upgrading their software that provides information processing services to Washington State School Districts. How does this affect us as a school district? The following information should help explain this.

What is WESPaC?

October 2004 Tech Newsletter (pdf)

WESPaC stands for WSIPC Enhanced Skyward Point and Click.

WSIPC is the Washington School Information Processing Cooperative and provides information processing services to most of our states school districts.

Skyward is the name of a Wisconsin based company that provides software packages for interfacing with student and fiscal records for school districts.

WESPaC is the Skyward application refined to to meet the specific needs of Washington State school systems. It consists of several modules that allow school teaching and office staff to use web-based "point and click" interfaces to input student attendance, grades, scheduling and eventually other information relating to food service, special education, and more.

A Little history...

In 1967, ten Washington school districts began a cooperative to share software development and hardware costs and provide centralized technological support. The result of this collaboration is the Washington School Information Processing Cooperative (WSIPC), a public agency that provides information services to the state's school districts. Today WSIPC has grown to serve Washington's school districts (including Ferndale) with complete information management systems for fiscal, human resources and student data.

Ferndale School District joined the cooperative in 1990. Since then we have used their services to process most of our student and fiscal data. In 1990 the software that interfaced with our records for the district was a terminal product. Using the communication program, VersaTerm (for Mac) and Reflections (for PC) staff could use their computer as a terminal and remotely connect to the WSIPC servers. This was all text driven (like using DOS). To get from screen to screen you needed to know the correct text code.

With the coming of the web there was a need to create a web based product so in 1995 Webwise Attendance was created- WSIPC's first web based product. This gave the user picture interface and could use a mouse to navigate through the program.

By September 2000, WSIPC realized it was time for an upgrade. The opportunity to upgrade was facilitated by the establishment of a statewide education network called the K-20 Educational Telecommunications Network, which provided all school districts in Washington with high-bandwidth Internet access.

Upgrading carried with it a new set of challenges:

The 279 school districts run a wide variety of hardware, and the new software would have to run on all systems across all districts. Approximately 50 percent of the desktop PCs in the districts are Macintoshes, and many districts also have a significant number of older Intel desktops that are considered underpowered.

The application would have to be delivered from a central location, because WSIPC's goal was to require no management or effort on the school district's part.

And because the system would be used by educators and administrators with varying levels of computing skills, it would have to be easy to use, yet sophisticated enough to manage the complex requirements of a school system.

Finally, the implementation had to help school districts meet the reporting requirements for state and federal regulations, such as the No Child Left Behind Act.

Who does this affect?

The Ferndale School District is implementing WESPaC for use by all teachers and all core administrative staff including the secretaries, counselors, registrars, and attendance staff. Teachers will be able to use WESPaC to take attendance online each day while core users will use WESPaC to access student records for registration, scheduling, tracking, transcripts, etc.

There are two types of software to be used with this new system. Teachers will use JEA Java Educator Access to take attendance and Core users (including but not limited to secretaries, counselors, attendance staff and registrars) will use Citrix .

The District's technology staff is working steadily to make computers and network ready for WESPaC. The FHS registrar, WSIPC Coordinator and our district secretaries have been working very hard to help prepare current data for the final conversion.

What is Go Live Day?

Go Live is the term used to describe the day (11/15/04) we start using the new system (WESPaC). The day before has been termed "the dark day" meaning that our access to to WSIPC information will be temporarily disabled so that they can archive the data to date and import our data to the new system. Two other entities,Timber Ridge Alternative School and Meridian School District will be "going Live" the same day as FSD.

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