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While district officials scrambled to sort out budget deficit issues last week, the Information Technology Department made progress on solving LA Unified’s costly student data management system problems, launching a more user-friendly MISIS website.

In his latest weekly update, Superintendent Ramon Cortines wrote, “The new website serves as a gateway for a variety of information needs, including general information about the project, updates on fixes and enhancements, training opportunities, and — perhaps most importantly — tools our employees can use to discuss MiSiS with their peers or to let us know how we’re doing.”

Although MISIS was down for 30 minutes Thursday, due to a technical issue with supporting equipment, the district is reporting some significant updates of multiple programs within the system, including:

• Roughly 75 percent of schools have negligible attendance backlog and are taking attendance correctly for every student in every class period. (Reclassifying students in grades 6 through 9 is still not possible using MISIS because the process is dependent, in part, on a reading assessment managed by a vendor.)
• Schools can now use MISIS to reclassify and print parent notification letters for English Learners in grades 2 through 5 and 10 through 12.
• All report cards — including comments — are now provided to parents in the correct home languages.

Principals and other school officials can begin entering student Master Schedules as early as tomorrow, pending the school board’s approval of the school year calendar. District officials are also asking the board to push back the start of school to a week later in August.

Flaws in the scheduling program at the beginning of the school year created chaos across school campuses. For weeks a series of glitches caused MISIS to delete student data, leading to scheduling errors that left thousands of students without class assignments and forced them to spend weeks in school auditoriums.

The district has spent more than $50 million to fix MISIS, and the tab is expected to double by the end of the year.