New Web site helps parents keep tabs
When asked what they did at school today, many kids are not so talkative, often answering only with the words “nothing” or “stuff.” Starting this school year, however, parents will be able to get easy answers to this question.
With the aim of further increasing communication between school and home, Warren County Schools will soon give parents access to a customized Web site that allows them to keep day-to-day tabs on their children’s attendance, homework assignments, grades and conduct.
The site, k12planet.com, is the brainchild of Chancery Software, a leading school management software company whose products the local school system already uses for grading and attendance purposes.
According to school system technology director Katrina Haley, the decision to use the Web site was based on the mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires, among other things, greater communication between school officials and parents.
“That’s the first reason,” she told a group of Warren County High School teachers at an in-service meeting explaining the Web site Monday afternoon. “The second is that it’s a good program. We’re aware that not all parents have access to the Internet, but a lot do, and we’re still going to be able to reach a lot of them this way.”
To access the site, parents must first obtain a valid username and password. These will be given by the individual schools to interested parents sometime around the start of school next week, but only after parents have given their written consent authorizing the posting of the confidential data on the Internet.
Should parents have more than one student in the system, they could obtain a family account which would give them to access all of their children’s information using only one username and password.
In transmitting the confidential data, Haley stressed every effort has been made to keep the information private. Using the most powerful security available, including data encryption and firewalls, data transmitted between the school’s computer and a home computer cannot be read or changed while in transit. Only parents, school officials and the student himself will be able to view the personal information, she said.
From a teacher’s standpoint, one of the biggest selling points of the site is its relative simplicity. Because it is operated by Chancery Software, the program will be able to pull a student’s grade and attendance information with no input from the teacher required. The only responsibility of a teacher would be to upload any homework assignments and other messages or instructions, which teachers could accomplish at school or at home.
Haley said parents should be able to access their children’s information in as little as two weeks, though it will most likely be another six weeks before the site is fully operational.
On the Web:
www.k12planet.com