Schoolwork goes online to keep parents in know

Chaylee Miller excels in school, especially in art.

The 13-year-old is an honors student at Deer Park Middle School.

She knows that if she ever wanted to slack off on a test, her parents would be right there to inspire her study habits.

Deer Park School District allows parents to access their child’s daily homework assignments, attendance and grades through the Internet.

Gone are the days when Miller could fib and say that she had no homework.

Now her parents know everything.

“It kind of bugs me sometimes,” Miller said.

Administrators and teachers love it.

“There’re no secrets anymore. Everything’s out in front,” said Deer Park Middle School assistant principal Tim Mulvey. More and more school districts are using technology to give parents access to crucial information like grades and performance. Idaho is in the early stages of implementing a statewide system called Idaho Student Information Management System. East Valley School District launched a system this year called Skyward that gives parents access to vital information including the balance of school lunch accounts. Central Valley School District recently discussed the idea of a similar program.

Spokane Public Schools recently purchased new digital equipment that will likely include a student-information section in the next few years.

Deer Park just happens to have embraced the technological trend a little sooner than most area districts. So far, it’s been a valuable tool, Mulvey said.

An Alabama-based company called Software Technology Inc. contacted Deer Park about three years ago and offered the district a bargain as part of expanding into the West, Mulvey said. STI was founded in 1982 and has contracts with schools in 28 states, mostly farther east.

“They asked us to pilot it for them,” Mulvey said. “Nobody else in the state of Washington uses it.”

In Deer Park, about 20 percent of parents use the system regularly.

“Each year more and more parents get used to it,” Mulvey said.

Some parents call whenever the system develops a bug, he said. This year’s hurricanes in the southeastern United States caused some outages when the company moved its information-storing servers farther inland, Mulvey said.

For parents who don’t have access to a computer or the Internet, counselors send out weekly printed updates. All students in the sixth grade and above are on the system. The district is discussing whether to include elementary schools.

During the first year, there was some reluctance among teachers who feared the system would add to their already busy schedules, Mulvey said. East Valley is still trying to encourage teachers to enter new information into its system daily. Officials don’t want to mandate the use of technology.

“We’re hoping they just start to gravitate toward it, because the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages,” said Brian Wallace, director of technology for East Valley.

In Deer Park, instead of using paper grade books, teachers now enter attendance and grades into a computer. Homework assignments are added daily by most teachers.

Seventh-grade science teacher Pam Ashford, who said she’s not a technology person, said the system helps her manage the day.

During a typical day of class Tuesday, Ashford scanned a recently printed sheet of the seating chart. The sheet includes names and photos, which is a nice aid for substitute teachers, she said. Students who are gone for the day are punched into a computer.

While giving instructions for the day’s assignment on human anatomy, Ashford interrupted a conversation between two students. One girl was telling her friend about the assignment she missed the day before. Ashford reminded them that the assignment is posted on the Internet and on the wall by the door. The two students fell silent again.

In a teacher’s room attached to the class, a teacher’s aide opened up the tracking system to check on her son in the high school.

“It allows me to check on him without him knowing I’m checking up,” said Janet Valenzuela. “It allows me to be in contact with him without actually being there.”

Kerry Bryant, 50, a Deer Park man with five foster children, said the technology tool changes the parenting game completely.

“More parents should get on it,” Bryant said.

Recently, the system showed him that one of his boys was flunking a class. Bryant told him that unless he got that grade up, he wouldn’t be playing in that Thursday’s football game.

“And guess what? On Thursday he had a passing grade,” Bryant said. “We would not have known that if this system was not in place.”