The 2014-2015 school year started with a big bang that came from LAUSD’s decision to switch from its ISIS computer system to MiSiS, which resulted in anger and frustration for many faculty members and students.
However the loudest outcry came from students who rightfully deserve to be upset about the crisis. As the first month of school commenced, seniors through freshmen were complaining that their schedules were wrong. Some seniors that needed 12th grade English were enrolled in 10th grade English and so on. All across the school district some students, outraged by the mistakes in schedules caused by MiSiS, protested.
At Thomas Jefferson Senior High School in Los Angeles, emotions were running high as students were so upset with not having the correct classes that they had a walk-out protesting the new system LAUSD implemented.
Besides the issue with schedules, there was also the issue of students being completely erased from the system, such was the case of a scared 6th grader who was not in the system in Millikan Middle School in Sherman Oaks.
The school year is in its second month now and although things have been slowly amended, there are still problems. This crisis set students and teachers behind. Although teachers can continue with lesson plans, students on the other hand must make up missing work and notes they missed while they were enrolled in the wrong classes.
Besides MiSiS causing a delay with schedules, MiSiS also wreaked havoc with the five-week report card, which was faulty to say the least. Here at DPMHS, numerous students had a missing grade or class on their report card.
Overall, DPMHS’ MiSiS experience has been distressing and flustering but luckily not as horrific as other schools across LAUSD. One reason for this is that DPMHS has a smaller student population compared to other schools.
The second reason for this is the efforts of DPMHS’ counselor Martina Torres and administration who spent many unpaid hours the few days before school in order manually create the schedules for students.
MiSiS’ function was to make inputting information easier for LAUSD teachers and staff it made things more difficult. However, the negative effects of MiSiS could have been prevented if LAUSD had been more careful.
LAUSD should have implemented MiSiS on a smaller scale and done test runs to see how it would perform. In the future, smaller scale tests will be useful and prevent all the anguish and frustration that is being felt now.
