Last trimester, Bloomington South didn’t print report cards for the first time in recent South history. That in itself isn’t a big deal, but the decision came from a much bigger problem. Skyward, the student information system that MCCSC uses, got an update just as the 2025-26 school year started. This update has led to many problems for teachers and students, but is greatly affecting the current seniors who are applying to college. 

New Skyward (Qmlativ), as students and teachers have come to call it, has been incorrectly calculating some GPAs and making it difficult to get transcripts. South seniors who are trying to complete their college applications have had to go to their counselor to have it calculated. Additionally, as Boris Ladwig detailed in a Herald Times article, New Skyward and Parchment, the student transcript service, are having trouble integrating, causing problems for counselors when they try to pull student transcripts. 

Another question on college applications is class rank. Counselors can no longer see individual students’ class ranks, only the valedictorian. Students have now had to answer ‘none’ under this question on their applications, which could have negative effects if a college finds this statistic very important. 

South’s head of counseling, Pat Cannon, said that this is because, when the switch happened, “all these templates, all these forms, all these things that we had built through the years [that South used for counseling functions], just did not come over with [the transfer].” He also agreed with the fears surrounding college applications as he said he is “afraid that… someone may not get into a college university… not necessarily because of what is on the transcript but they’re going to use that, and [South] is going to get in some kind of trouble.”  

Additionally, Cannon said that with the last Skyward transition, the company had sent some people to train the staff, whereas this time there were only tutorial videos, which proved to be a lot less helpful. 

South teachers have also run into some problems with getting Canvas to sync with New Skyward. For the first few weeks of the 2025-26 school year, the Skyward gradebook was empty, because when teachers would put grades in Canvas, they wouldn’t transfer to Skyward. 

Seth Pizzo, South’s computer help tech and CRAM teacher, does a lot of data-mining for his job, the practice of extracting large datasets from a program, and he has a lot of frustrations with New Skyward. As an example, he said that when trying to pull a record of all the students who are currently failing a class “the old system made it easier…to go in and export all of [those] students.” They do this process on a weekly basis and the new system has no way to do that and has just made any mass data export “confusing and difficult.” 

On the other hand, not everyone has a fight to pick with New Skyward. Some South students have mentioned their appreciation for the new ‘Login with Entra’ button on the Skyward login page. This button only has students type in their username and password the first time, and then every time after they only have to click the Entra button and it will take them straight to the Skyward homepage. This feature makes it quicker for students to get into Skyward, but it does bring up questions about the security of students’ information. 

Only seven other high schools in Indiana, out of over 300, have also made the switch to New Skyward, and they have been dealing with the same issues. Cannon said that he and other people that work a lot with Skyward “were told that Old Skyward was going away,” but they’ve found out this isn’t the case. At least one other high school, Decatur Central, is still using Old Skyward. So the question on why the switch had to be made still stands. 

Now that we are further into the school year, teachers are starting to get the hang of the system, but counselors are still struggling with their end of things. Cannon said that he “would like to see a Skyward engineer [at South] helping them fix the bugs,” but that the company hasn’t been responding quickly or helpfully. 

When contacted for a statement, Skyward did not reply.