April 2008 — Features
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Meet the Parents
Next-Gen Parenting
TECHNOLOGISTS AT THE NEVADA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION recently
turned to a web-based system from The Grow Network/McGraw Hill that provides parents with access to a variety of
useful, grade-specific educational activities and information about student
performance on state assessments.
The system, dubbed the Nevada Parent Network, went live in February, and is expected to be rolled out in earnest this fall after the state's 2008 criterion-referenced tests in reading, mathematics, and science.
Keith Rheault, superintendent of public instruction for the Nevada Department of Education, says that by November the network will provide specific student performance data to parents, as well as analysis of which areas are a student's strengths and weaknesses.
"The idea of involving parents is to get them helping the kids at home," Rheault explains. "The more they can get involved in understanding where their children are, we think that's a key to improving performance overall."
Already, the Nevada Parent Network is taking strides toward fostering greater involvement. Rheault's team organized a Parent Involvement Summit in Las Vegas, which was held at the end of February.
At the conference, school board members, teachers, administrators, and parents met to discuss ways in which parents can participate in their children's education. The group recommended using the new website to link parents to specific information they can use to create personalized improvement plans specific to their children's academic standing. The first part of these upgrades should launch by early 2009.
"The technology breaks down the language barrier quite literally with the click of a button," says Massey, who recently became an assessment and accountability specialist for the Office of Assessment, Evaluation, and Accountability in the Orange County Department of Education. "To communicate with these parents in their native languages, it's like a breath of fresh air."
While only a handful of parent notification services offer broadcasts in multiple languages, a number of them provide the kind of situational message sending in use at South El Monte High, buzzing parents with phone-, e-mail-, and text-based reports on their child's performance and attendance record.
Florida Virtual School (FLVS), an online school serving students in grades 6 to 12, subtracts the middleman by giving parents log-in credentials to Elluminate Academic Edition, a learning management system and online gradebook from Elluminate. The clearance lets parents freely investigate how their kids are doing, peruse the work they've submitted for recent assignments, and see how frequently they are meeting deadlines.
