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Parent homework: Stay in the loop
Times Union - Albany, NY News - September 3, 2006
Maria Troskowski shows up to back-to-school night with a long list of ways for teachers to reach her: cellphone, work and home phone numbers, and perhaps the best method, her e-mail address.
Working in Albany and living in East Nassau, it's difficult for Troskowski to know what's going on at her 14-year-old daughter's school.
She double-checks homework at night and constantly presses Nicole about assignments. When her New Lebanon Central School District started using an Internet [web hosting] program [Edline] through which teachers could post assignments, Troskowski logged on religiously.
But not all of Nicole's teachers kept their pages updated, and not every teacher e-mailed her when Nicole struggled with her work. She was still in the dark about her daughter's education.
"The way things are, it just makes it hard if you work," Troskowski says. "If you don't show up it's like you don't care, another don't-care mom. ... You do try, and then you get labeled a parent that doesn't."
Working parents with school-age children are frustrated. The U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics reports that 61 percent of married women work outside the home, yet many schools still rely on phone calls home or midday visits to the classroom to let parents know what's going on with their child's education. And just as busy are teachers, who must prepare students for high stakes tests and meet the diverse needs of their students.
It's more important than ever, says Charles Dedrick, superintendent of the Cohoes City School District, to meet parents where they're at.
"It used to be that teachers could call up a parent at any time," says Dedrick, whose district offers evening parent conferences and uses a new Web-based school program [Edline] to broadcast school information. "You've got to communicate with everybody, so we try to communicate in as many ways as possible."
Although every school district maintains a Web site and some techno-savvy teachers have done the same for their individual classrooms, a growing number of districts are turning to sophisticated online programs to give parents 24-hour access to their children's classroom.
Donna Andress envisions a day when meetings with mothers and fathers will be done through videoconferencing. Already, she's spent the last several years as the Saratoga Spring City School District's instructional technologist, showing teachers how to use computers and other technology in their classrooms. This month, she'll go back to teaching sixth grade, and is eager to use the tools in her own work, to find better ways to communicate with parents.
"It's really critical to support the public in what they want, and what they want is communication," she says. "They want to be able to do this, and you can't stop progress."
This month, all Saratoga Springs teachers in kindergarten through eighth grade will use an Internet program called Edline to share information with parents. Widespread use in the high school is planned for next fall....
Teacher Kris Ditzel has been trying out Edline for a few years in his fourth-grade class at Saratoga's Dorothy Nolan Elementary School.
Students and their parents can check grades in various subjects, which are constantly updated because Edline is linked with his computerized grade book.
His students no longer can escape homework just because they leave a worksheet at school. It's available on his Edline page, and can be printed at home.
Also available to parents and students is a list of homework for the week, so kids can work ahead if they know they have a big baseball game coming up. And speaking of baseball, Ditzel sometimes posts photos of the kids at sports or other extracurricular activities, as a high-tech form of show-and-tell.
For the most part, full-day games of phone tag and endless evening calls to parents have been replaced by e-mails. (Last year, he received about 175 of them.)... Ditzel says technology has made him more efficient and communication more effective.
"Parents are really into it [Edline] because if they are at work or they can't come into the classroom, they feel like they're in tune with what's going on," Ditzel says.
Edline has allowed Janet Pertierra to keep tabs on her sons, Dan, who just graduated, and Mark, a junior in the Cohoes City School District, where they've used the program in the secondary schools for about three years.
"I'd say, 'Did you do your homework?' and they'd say 'Yeah,"' she says, but at times that wasn't the case. Now, she logs onto Edline to see if Mark's turning in assignments. It's critical to have a second source of information, she says, as children get older.
"As the boys got into high school, you never saw papers come home."
Pertierra wishes more teachers would keep their information updated, especially because Mark's performance improved in the classes where she had access to the latest test scores and homework assignments. All it took to motivate Mark was a mother who, armed with information, could insist he improve...
Gish can be reached at 454-5089 or by e-mail at jgish@timesunion.com.