MyEdBC software delays Port Coquitlam high school report cards
Reporting function of new $95M software MyEdBC not operational, claims school
Report cards for some B.C. students will be delayed because of issues with the province's new $95 million student information system, according to notices sent home from one school.
Parents of students attending Riverside Secondary School in Port Coquitlam have been told via email that interim report cards that were supposed to be sent out yesterday, and first-term formal report cards that are due out mid-November will both be delayed.
"Unfortunately, the reporting feature of this software is not ready for us to use for our interim report cards scheduled for October 14, 2015," the email states.
"Furthermore, the province will be taking the software offline from November 6, 2015-November 12 ,2015 as they migrate more districts onto MyEdBC. This unfortunately coincides with the date of our first Formal Report Card and Parent-Teacher Interviews."
Riverside PAC president Karen Kelt says the delay is a problem. "If your child is not doing well, then of course you want to know right away if there's any red flags," she said, noting the issue would be much worse if it happened later in school year when Grade 12s are applying to post secondary schools. .
"If this was the second semester people would be really upset," said Kelt.
B.C. Education Minister Mike Bernier denied there are any issues with the software itself.
"In this specific case the local school actually made a choice to use a different kind of reporting system for the interim but that had nothing to do with MyEdBC not working," Bernier told CBC. "My EdBC is actually, according to the latest reports, operating at full capacity the way it's intended to."
The minister also said the shutdown in November is scheduled maintenance.
The MyBCEd software has been flagged as problematic since its roll out last month, causing chaos in some schools around class scheduling. Teachers also claim the the software lacks functionality in the most basic classroom tasks like recording attendance and generating a class list.
MyBCEd was purchased by the Ministry of Education at a cost of $95-million from the Fujitsu company. It was supposed to be an improvement on the previous system known as BCeSIS which was full of glitches and crashed frequently.
With files from Farrah Merali