"It's a little bit of chaos, but it's organized chaos," said Ken Nomura, the retired Maui District complex superintendent who remains in office until his successor is named.

"It's a new system, and we had glitches at a couple of schools but for the most part, everything went smoothly."

"Every new system brings its challenges, so we're going to have to work out the kinks," said Baldwin High School Principal Natalie Gonsalves.

Teachers and school administrators said the problems from the system are manageable, while suggesting that teachers, registrars and students were not provided enough training on implementing the program.

The Department of Education installed the program, eSIS, as a Web-based record-keeping system to maintain grades, schedules and attendance records on a statewide system. It was implemented across the state by the DOE for the first time this year, although several campuses piloted the program last year.

It requires special IBM computers that are provided to teachers, counselors and other support staff who then receive in-service training on using eSIS.

At Maui High School on Friday, office staff said they have not had any major problems this year, and that things have been running smoothly since they started on the eSIS pilot program last year

Baldwin High School Registrar Joyce Chun said Baldwin is starting up on the system, and there have been errors, but only four students had scheduling problems directly as a result of the new system

Other students have had their schedules mixed up because they did not fill their preregistration cards out correctly at the end of last school year, while counselors were swamped with requests to alter schedules that caused additional errors.

"It really hasn't had any glitches, it just takes longer to make the schedules," Chun said. "The end result is the same, but just the way it's done has changed.

Gonsalves said students will need to pay more attention to their forms during preregistration

A Baldwin teacher, Scott Clarke, said a number of students did not have complete schedules and needed to see their counselors to get into their classes.

But he completed the training on eSIS and said, "Once everyone gets used to it, it'll be a good system.

"It's all part of progressing. We're just going through the growing pains."

Nomura said the district office and the state DOE sent technical staff to schools dealing with eSIS errors to assist in clearing the problems.

"There were some mistakes in inputting data. We've sent a lot of our resource people to help the schools and the state office sent their personnel," he said.