Bonterra ETO vs. PowerSchool Unified Classroom Special Programs

I can see from an education perspective how it would be an incredible fit. The functionality is all there and growing. From a CAC perspective, it's still a work in progress, especially for larger CACs where lots more services are provided and the lines between programs blur a bit more. I think that ETO is becoming more user-friendly for CACs and Social Solutions is moving in the right direction too. I can't wait for some of the new features to roll out and be able to use them in our system. I really do think that will improve our user experience significantly.

Incentivized

PowerSchool Special Education is well suited in one specific area: special education in elementary, middle and high schools. It works here due to the nature of the platform, which focuses on meeting the needs of students with all disabilities. The software offers information on specific cases, students, as well as Academics. This supports the mission of supporting all students and making it easier for educators, parents, and administration to be more heavily involved in tracking, monitoring and supporting students. When using PowerSchool Special Education, it simplifies the IEP process. Collaboration is one of the best abilities the software provides. There is a need to track program eligibility, including 501 accommodations and Title 1, and in a school with such a large population, the functionality that this software offers to users is important.

Incentivized

• ETO captures the variety of data that can give us more ways to understand what is happening with the participants we serve.
• Participant dashboards are customizable and can be very helpful for direct service providers in serving their participants.
• The referral system within ETO allows us to make easier referrals between programs and track how often that occurs.
• It doesn't take a strong technical person to set up programs and other pieces within ETO.

Incentivized

• It provides all the documents necessary for supporting federal and state laws in regards to the special education program.
• Extremely effective in helping to meet reporting standards for students. Teachers that fall behind on deadlines or timelines are given reminders and provided with processes to monitor progress and reporting.
• Case management is easy, which leads to 100% compliance. This is important because the best strength is that this platform helps to increase funding by meeting all requirements of the Fed and State.
• An additional strength is the collaborative potential it offers. The platform offers student portals to let staff access all resources on demand.

Incentivized

• ETO needs to be mobile friendly because a lot of our staff do outreach work, including all touchpoints, demographics, enrollments, and dashboards on their phone.
• Too many ways to get to the same thing. E.g. Add New Participant Tab, Add New Participant in Navigation Bar, Add New Participant on Home Page, etc. This generates mistakes and a need for very thorough training and tight oversight.
• Inability to remove touchpoints from custom universes once they have already been added. There is a limit of 20 touchpoints per custom universe. If the touchpoints in a universe have become obsolete or irrelevant, there is no way to make room for a new, more relevant touchpoint. Old touchpoints can be disabled but not removed.
• Need to pay extra for email and calendar notifications. This should be a built-in function, as the software already costs a lot, and many organizations cannot afford to spend more to get this vital functionality.
• It would be great if a "Case Conference" chat feature could be attached to participants. Case managers could enter the chat room and relay important information about the participant to each other. This could also work when people aren't there in real time, like emails. The important part is that all of this information would be accessible UNDER the participant's profile or dashboard that it's regarding.

Incentivized

• In terms of improvement, the interface is extremely ugly and simple in design, color and icon design. The platform needs to have a much more interactive and appealing interface so that use is more comfortable.
• For parents, their side of the platform has a lot of options. That needs to be simplified. I think less and more drop downs within the key menus would help.
• The disability codes are very lengthy. Perhaps there are easier or faster ways to access subsections to select.

Incentivized

Social Solutions has been great for our organization. It has allowed us to not only report on data, but to dive into it to see trends and give snapshots of the current status of our neighbors. Social Solutions has been helpful in getting us to see additional ways we can use our data and ways that it is easier for front line staff to use this tool

Incentivized

6 years of experience dealing with a poor interface, unreliable reports, and broken promises with virtually zero improvements. I have too many issues to list but have an entire file if anyone ever shows interest from a site Manager. I listed some of the issues in some of the first questions in this review and I appreciate the opportunity to share my experiences.

Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.

Incentivized

Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.

Incentivized

We love the first tier customer support folks! They're friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable within the scope of their position. The experiences we've had with their supervisors have also been mostly good and again they seem to be doing what they can within the scope of their positions. This is what prevents me from selecting 1. Unfortunately, none of these wonderful folks can offer real solutions when things are actually broken. They verify there's a problem and send it to the black hole called "the developers". After that, we don't hear anything useful and we figure out how to live with/work around the problem ourselves. (Requests for updates typically get "still with the developer" responses.) This is highly frustrating given that most of our issues are basic system issues (functionality that worked then broke after an update by Social Solutions, servers not syncing, report universes not flattening automatically, etc.). All we want is for the system to work as designed and to be fixed in a timely fashion when it doesn't. Apparently, that's too much to ask. (And no, we don't expect it to happen instantly, programming and quality control checks obviously take time.)

Incentivized

Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.

Incentivized

Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.

Incentivized

We originally built our program around SharePoint and were dissatisfied by the lack of transparency it provided. We then moved to ETO, primarily because it was the cheapest of the other solutions that we looked at. Now, we are realizing that we are not getting any real value from our ETO system, so we will likely be investing in a more sophisticated system.

Incentivized

There is no other software on the market that is specifically focused on improving the support of special education programs. PowerSchool Special Education system has a similar interface and structure that Moodle Rooms offer; however, Moodle Rooms is for content management and student management. PowerSchool Special Education is not related to course curriculum management, it is primarily focused on special education programs. Managing special education programs can be very difficult and stressful. It is impossible to successfully comply and healthily support a special education program without tools such as PowerSchool Special Education. Even more important than what other software does do for schools and educators, this platform makes it more convenient for families. Electronic forms and parent portals make processes easier.

Incentivized

The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.

Incentivized

• It has saved us time in terms of putting together reports for internal use and for external funders.
• Better accountability for gathering information.
• Given the monthly cost of the system we are probably paying too much but the cost of switching to another piece of software doesn't quite justify a move yet.

Incentivized

• There is also a positive impact on ROI for the school. Utilizing this software provides the school with the ability to increase the potential it receives in Title 1 funding. Title 1 funding is a major source of funding for inner-city schools in particular.
• Normally, the IEP and tracking process is lengthy, filled with paper, and often takes more time than necessary. Utilizing this software speeds up the process and provides clear requirements to be met, which reduces the number of questions and confusing meetings or papers left in teacher mailboxes.
• I have not experienced a negative return on investment with the software, because, without it, the paper trail would be too lengthy and the process would be much more convoluted, with long meetings, long sheets of paperwork, and missed deadlines due to a lack of clear collaboration.

Incentivized