Next year, Williston’s administration and technology departments have decided to change the current combination of Schoology, a learning management system, and BlackBaud, a student information database. In the fall, Williston will welcome Veracross, a new system that does the work of both BlackBaud and Schoology in one place.

“There has been two different systems, [Schoology and BlackBaud] and everything that we want to share with the other has to be manually copied over,” Associate Academic Dean Kim Evelti explained. “We love what Schoology has brought to us, but what we don’t love is that it is not connected to our student information database,” she continued.

One of the previous programs, BlackBaud, is used primarily by teachers and administration to keep track of student’s classes, grades, credits, and general information. “BlackBaud is a database where we keep all of our student information,” Evelti said.

The other program currently in use is Schoology, a learning management system used for teachers to post and receive assignments and for students to see their grades and assignments.

These two systems are not connected to one another, which can create disconnect in information that can cause difficulties. “We will sometimes have students that switch classes and can’t see their assignments because it can take twenty-four hours to change the information on Schoology because we have to do this manually,” Evelti said.

Right now, we have Schoology, we have BlackBaud, we have all these different places where students can go and it just gets confusing. We want to have one place,” Chief Information Officer Andrew Shelffo said.

“We’ve known for a while that we needed a change,” Shelffo said. “We did about a year of need assessment and then we began the process of selecting a system. As we went through… Veracross consistently rose to the top of every list,” he continued.

“It’s just about having one place for people to go. One place to log into, one system for people to familiarize themselves with,” Shelffo said.

Veracross is both a learning management system and a student information database.

The system is produced by Breuer & Co. and was first introduced in 2003. “Our focus on long term client relationships, engineering excellence, and industry  leading client support and services has served our company and our customers well,” the Veracross website states.

“Veracross was really focused on independent and boarding schools, so they just kind of get what we need,” Evelti said. “They have dorm assignments, check-in procedures, travel forms… Some of these systems just didn’t exist in BlackBaud because the system is not developed with a boarding school in mind.”

Because Veracross is designed for independent schools, it provides many more features that would be useful to Williston than Schoology and BlackBaud do. Veracross is able to display up to date grades and assignments as well as student’s calendars and daily schedules. According to Evelti, Veracross will ideally include all athletic commitments in student’s calendars.

So far, in the process of transferring data from the current database to Veracross, Evelti and Shelffo report positive results.

“Whenever you’re changing a system that you are used to there are always nerves and anxiety.” Evelti continued, “we’re hoping that it will all be worth it and that people will be really happy with the changes.”

“We are making sure we have a process for teachers so that they can take material from Schoology and transfer it to Veracross,” Shelffo said. “Our teachers know the vocabulary of a learning management system now, so the transition should be a little bit easier from Schoology to Veracross,” he continued.

“Faculty will have a lot of training on how to use the systems,” Evelti added.

The mass transfer of student data to Veracross is well under way and both the technology department and the administration appear excited to welcome Veracross into Williston’s daily life in the fall.