April 2008 — Features
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Meet the Parents
Anna Coppola, the e-school's instructional leader for science and math, says parents also can see teacher feedback and request that individual teachers e-mail their comments on certain assignments directly home.
"We encourage them to log in a lot," Coppola says, noting that a recent survey by Florida TaxWatch indicated that FLVS students scored higher marks on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test than their counterparts at traditional schools. "Building relationships and making parents feel appreciated, involved, and wanted helps our students be more successful."
This same approach is being used with special education students by the High Plains Educational Cooperative, which serves 17 school districts in southwest Kansas. Administrators recently adopted the NetIEP software from Netchemia, which enables the development of individualized education programs for special needs students, and allows their parents to keep tabs on how well their children are keeping to the plan.
High Plains Assistant Director Marcy Fierstein says the solution works wonders. Every day, educators enter student performance data directly into the system. Then, from home, parents can log on and see what material was covered in class, and how their children are performing in each subject area.
When a parent has questions about something on a report, the parent can call or e-mail the teacher directly. Fierstein says that in a rural area such as southwest Kansas, having this instant interactivity is a vast improvement over the old strategy: weekly printed reports mailed to the home address.
"It builds an immediate and lasting bridge between parents and teachers," says Fierstein. "Overall, when you know that parents are going to be looking at their child's progress every single night, the system also holds our educators more accountable, which isn't a bad thing."
For districts whose funding is tied up in attendance reports, "performance" reporting focuses on how many students performed their daily obligation by showing up for class. Kentucky's Newport Independent Schools is using Honeywell's Instant Alert service to maximize that number. Bill Shamblin, the district's director of communications, says that when parents are kept informed about their children's whereabouts, they seem to wield more control over how and when the kids show up for school. He has the figures to back it up: In just one year of using the notification system, Newport managed to increase its average daily attendance rate from 93.6 percent in 2004- 2005 to 95.1 percent the following school year.
Shamblin says this jump in attendance generated $80,000 in additional state funding for the district, the equivalent of two teacher salaries. "The return on investment has been outstanding, and our attendance records put us in competition with suburban school districts," he says. "More importantly, there are more students in class, and as a result, those students are more likely to move on to higher education."
