As this school year began, Hawaii Baptist Academy completed its transition to a new online education management system. This system, previously known as MyBackpack, is now called MyEagle and is the digital portal that connects students and their families to a myriad of services, from making tuition payments, ordering school meals, to viewing grades and class schedules.
According to Tammy Mori, HBA’s Director of Communications and Public Relations, the school’s first priority with the new system is to make life simpler for both families and faculty. “At the heart of the transition was the desire to make it easier for our HBA families to stay connected with the school, as well as consolidate and streamline processes and information for our staff,” she wrote. Previously, parents and students had to log in to several different online platforms, such as MyBackpack, FACTS (for tuition payments), and hba.net (to fill out permission forms.) With different passwords for all the websites, many would get confused about which login matched with which password. However, now that all these services are consolidated in the MyEagle website, Mori hopes HBA families will have a much easier ad less time-consuming online experience with school business.
Mori hopes that one of the features students will find most helpful is being able to pre-order food online. To do this, students go to the resource section on the MyEagle site and order food via the Dining Services app. Students with pre-orders can bypass the lunch line to pick up their food.
So far at the high school, staff and faculty are still adjusting to and learning to use the new system. Elton Kinoshita, high school principal, wrote, “Based upon feedback from some staff members, the new system does not always allow us to ‘tailor make’ elements within the program to best suit our specific needs. Ideally, if we could have the positive things of MyEagle and retain a few of the things we liked under the old system, we would have a near perfect system.”
The gradual transition to this new system began last school year, with the elementary and middle school making the switch first. Mori noted that the transition has had many other benefits aside from convenience. She wrote, “Instead of operating in separate platforms or modules, the consolidation and integration has helped bridge our campuses and programs together. It’s meant to create more engagement among students, parents, faculty/staff through a cloud-based digital environment.”
