eventcalendar2 or alternatives

Our high school has been using WebCT and hates it. A few teachers are familiar with WP and now many teachers are wanting me to put together a simple system based on WP to use as courseware. All the features I need are coming together nicely except the calendar. I need some sort of event calendar. I would love to use eventcalendar2 so I don’t have to worry about setting up a separate database to handle calendar. I am having the same problem I have found in multiple threads: either future events are not found, or they display on the front page. Does anyone have further suggestions for getting ec2 to work with 1.5? Maybe a suggestion for an alternative? I would prefer an alternative let me install multiple calendars on the same database by changing prefixes like I do with WP. Any advice would be helpful as I am trying to get this set up before the end of the school year so teachers can experiment with it over the summer.

Thanx
MC/SR