Frederick County Public Schools made a transition from the grading site Pinnacle to the grading and attendance site Home Access Center (HAC) and Teacher Access Center (TAC) for the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year.
Middletown High School’s students, parents and teachers have been adapting to this change since the beginning of the new school year. HAC is now the new Pinnacle.
Unlike Pinnacle, HAC has a wide variety of uses besides being able to check on grades. There are different tabs on top of the site that allow students and parents to check attendance, classes, grades and registration. Pinnacle, on the other hand, only allowed students and parents to check grades.
Isaac Hoehn, Middletown High School senior, dislikes the new grading system change. He liked Pinnacle because “it was easier to navigate and it was just more simple.”
The different tabs on HAC allow students and parents to become more involved with academic success.
The attendance tab color codes the days students miss, arrived late, leave early or attend a field trip. This makes it easier to figure out what classes students miss and what work they need to make up.
MHS junior Lindsey Brandt said “The tabs are helpful because if you SSL first period like I do and you are doing your timesheet, it’s easy to look back and see if you were late in the morning.”
The adaptability of HAC has been difficult for students at MHS. “Memorizing the new password was hard and learning how to use the tabs was confusing,” said MHS senior Victoria Farron.
Teachers throughout the county were informed “almost a full year before the ‘end of life’ of Pinnacle,” said the FCPS Student Informations Systems Team.
The Student Informations Systems Team and FCPS also sent out a Find-Out-First to parents and students “unveiling” HAC and TAC. The Find-Out-First helped parents and students quickly learn how to use HAC efficiently.
Ever since the change from Pinnacle to HAC, students, teachers and parents wonder about the change and why they have to learn a whole new system of grading.
FCPS chose to switch for the benefit of the county. “Global Scholar, the software vendor for Pinnacle, announced to its customers they would no longer support Pinnacle grade book program,” said the Student Informations Systems team.
Frederick County has called this first year a “learning curve” for everyone.
As students, teachers and parents use the new grading system, they will become more accustom to all the new features HAC and TAC have to offer.