Districts let parents see student data online

They’re perhaps the most asked and least answered questions between a parent and a teen: How was school today? Got any homework?

The answers are easier to find this year thanks to a new online grading system offered by the Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene school districts. Now even parents living out of state can bypass their student and go straight to the source at the mere click of a mouse.

The new systems allow parents to access their children’s grades, assignment lists and attendance records through a password-protected Web site. Teachers are to update the sites regularly with scores, due dates and missed classes.

The move – coupled with Coeur d’Alene’s switch from mailed high school newsletters to online ones – is part of schools’ increasing push to embrace the digital age to make it easier for parents to access information, and to save money from tight budgets.

“I think it’s an initiative nationally,” Jean Bengfort, Coeur d’Alene district director of technology, told parents during a meeting of the Parent Teacher Association presidents last week.

Parents can still pick up a paper copy of the Lake City or Coeur d’Alene high schools’ monthly newsletter in the lobbies, but the schools aren’t shelling out the approximately $4,880 that Lake City High School Principal John Brumley estimates was spent on printing and mailing the 20-plus-page newsletters.

“Readership, I think, was suspect,” Brumley said, emphasizing that parents who want to read the newsletter still can while those who tossed it in the trash don’t have to, now.

As more parents begin to use the online grading system, schools might also do away with printed progress reports, mailing them out only upon request.

“I would be very surprised to see that at least in a couple years we aren’t doing printed progress reports by the exception and not by the rule,” said Tom Hobson, administrative systems analyst for the Coeur d’Alene School District. “I think that’s still down the pike somewhere, but we’ve got to be really, really conscious that we’re not cutting off parents that don’t have access.”

That’s the same reason Post Falls is reluctant to do away with the printed reports, though district Technology Coordinator Jon Wilkerson said he suspects that will happen eventually.

Called the Parental Access Support System, the Post Falls School District’s online grading system uses a different setup than Coeur d’Alene’s Parent Connect but offers essentially the same information.

Post Falls’ system is for middle and high school students only; Coeur d’Alene’s includes elementary students but doesn’t use the same grading system it does for middle and high school students. It instead includes mostly disciplinary and attendance reports.

Links to the site are available through the school districts’ Web sites and are accessible from any computer with Internet access. Some divorced parents living out of state are using the system to keep up with their children’s schoolwork, Hobson said.

Parents of about 2,640 students in the Coeur d’Alene district – more than a quarter of the district’s approximately 10,000 students – are using the Parent Connect program, Hobson said, with more signing up all the time. Neither the Post Falls system nor the Coeur d’Alene system requires extra work from teachers, though some are finding they’re not plugging grades in as fast as parents want to look at them, Hobson said.

The system actually helps communication between parents and teachers rather than decreasing it, Hobson said, because it gives parents more information about their student to discuss with teachers. Instead of asking the general “how is my child doing?” question, parents are asking about specific assignments, Hobson said.

The system can also serve as a backup to the automated phone calls the high school attendance offices make to the home of a student who missed class that day.

“You can’t intercept this one like the phone call,” Hobson said.

Wilkerson said he’s heard nothing but positive comments from parents and teachers about the system.

“The only people that probably aren’t really happy with the system are some of the students,” Wilkerson said.