Wake County is switching North Carolina student information systems (NCSIS) from Powerschool to Infinite Campus on July 1, 2025.
Infinite Campus is a student information system (SIS) platform designed to manage attendance, grades, schedules and other information for students in any county that uses it. Students, administrators and parents can use the software to manage and supervise student performance.
The county announced that they would be switching systems after a Powerschool data breach on December 28, 2024. The data breach affected student and staff personal information including addresses, names, phone numbers, emails, and even some staff social security numbers (SSNs).
However, the change was not a recent decision. The school board voted to modernize the NCSIS system in November 2023, over a year before the Powerschool data breach.
The switch is occurring in two phases. Phase one was released in July, 2024 in select schools around the state, and phase two is occurring in July, 2025. Wake County is a part of phase two. Initial training sessions were offered by the NCSIS staff to make the transition as smooth as possible and teachers were also designated to train other teachers.
One trainer at Green Hope, Ms. Kimberly Pyland, prepared training materials with a group of five other Green Hope teachers. She describes the process. “We will just kind of give them [other teachers] a run down of deadlines, like claim your account now, play with it over the summer, and when teachers come back in the fall the five of us will each pick a part of Infinite Campus and become kind of experts on that part.”
Although the software will be implemented in the 2025-26 school year, training has just begun for teachers. Many of them do not even know what features they will have access to.
The NCDPI lists all of the features of Infinite Campus that North Carolina has access to on their website, including drop out prevention, a classroom system, messaging systems, translation systems and more. However, Wake County will not be able to use all of these features in the 2025-26 school year. “So the state does [have almost every module], but right now the only thing Wake County is rolling out for us this coming year is attendance and gradebook,” Ms. Pyland said.
Currently, counties utilize third-party applications in order to communicate with parents and students. These applications also control how students and parents pay for specific items within the school system. Families have to download more apps and learn how to use more systems.
The learning management system contained in Infinite Campus could be a replacement for another system North Carolina currently uses, Canvas. Currently, teachers use Canvas to post assignments, quizzes and much more everyday class content.
A system many teachers in the county use to communicate with parents and students is TalkingPoints, a messaging app that helps parents monitor their student’s progress. Infinite Campus also poses an alternative to that system. It has its own messaging system that teachers can use to communicate with students and their families.
Using the “Campus Payments” section of Infinite Campus, families can make payments for school trips, activities, schools stores and more through the system. Right now, the county uses a system called SchoolCash Online. If the system is built into an SIS, it would make it easier for families to find and make their school payments.
Infinite Campus integrates all of these third-party services into its platform such that teachers, students and parents alike can access communication and payments in one central and secure location.
Ms. Pyland also believes that the county may be turning to Infinite Campus to consolidate the systems. “I think why they are heading towards Infinite Campus is because it is a one-stop-shop. Right now we have systems for discipline, we have systems for grades, we have systems for communications, we have Canvas.” Switching to Infinite Campus for these applications may relieve the county and families of the cost and responsibility of using the current systems.
The county will not immediately have access to all of the Infinite Campus features owned by the NCDPI. However, the county may have access to these features in the future. In terms of a switch in platforms Wake County uses, Ms. Pyland believes, “If the state stops paying for Canvas, we’ll go to the learning management side of Infinite Campus, kind of like it’s all-in-one.”
Beyond the systems of Infinite Campus, its features work differently than Powerschool and require staff to get used to. Ms. Pyland believes that parts of the system are difficult to learn and require more training to understand. “The gradebook looks non-intuitive, it doesn’t look like you would look at it and be like ‘oh, that’s where I would create an assignment.’”
In contrast, some features of the new platform are easier to use. Infinite Campus has tiles for each student where teachers can put in grades and take attendance. These tiles allow teachers to In Powerschool, teachers have to visit multiple pages to do these actions, making some parts of Infinite Campus more user-friendly and efficient.
Infinite Campus is coming in the 2025-26 school year, and once teachers overcome the initial learning curve, Ms. Pyland is hopeful that it will become effortless. “I’m guessing once we use it, it will become better, like more second-nature.”
