With all of the violence that has taken place in schools south of the border recently, parents might be thinking seriously about the disaster preparedness of their children's schools.
Tom Hawboldt, technology director for the Light of Christ Catholic School Division, was especially worried. In the event of a disaster, he explained, "that ability to quickly inform parents is vital."
The school division, partially in response to the Newtown shootings, rapidly created a system to inform parents in the event of an emergency.
Called PowerAnnounce, the program can be accessed by any school administrator with an Internet connection, though access can also be given out selectively, for example to teachers or chaperones on an overseas trip. If calls do need to be sent out - in the event of a school closure or a more serious event - the calls are sent out automatically through a voice-over-IP system. The system does not use the school's phone lines, meaning that concerned parents will be able to get through to administrators as the calls are going out should they want to.
Previously, LOCCSD had used "phone trees" - one teacher would call three teachers, who would each call three teachers, who would each call three teachers, and so on. It worked to get word out quickly, but there were obvious flaws. If one teacher was unreachable, so too were all the people that teacher was supposed to reach. And, after receiving the message, parents would be unable to call the school, as its phone lines would all be in use.
PowerAnnounce allows phone calls or text messages to be sent out instantly, to one or both parents. In Hawboldt's mind, it also provides help in the critically important field of parent-school interaction.
"For us, this is another level of parent engagement. We want to make sure that parents are completely engaged." Hawboldt remarks. "The walls are kinda thick around here. But we would prefer if they were completely transparent."
The school division has also acquired a new tool for parsing the vast amount of data on student performance, an important step in reaching their achievement goals.
The school had formerly used a system known as SIRS for managing its student data and distributing grades to students and parents. But the data that SIRS produced wasn't useful, or at least wasn't useful as quickly as the school division needed it to be. Hawboldt explained that simply inputting all the data into the system could take tech personnel as long as three months. If tests changed, the school would have to spend even longer revamping its system.
But as an automated service, PowerSchool doesn't require the school to build spreadsheets at all. Relieved of the burden of building, maintaining and entering data into spreadsheets, Hawboldt estimates the school division will save enough money in six months to pay for the system, which doesn't come cheap.
The new system makes it far easier for teachers and administrators to analyze data in student performance at any level - sorted by sex, aboriginal status, school, district, grade, and any other category the school division can dream up. Issues in under- or over-performance can be brought immediately to a teacher and parent's attention and acted on. If the issue persists, it can be brought further up the chain, to administrators. The data, of course, is not just academic, but also includes disciplinary history, attendance records, and comments teachers have attached to assignments.
Just as a doctor should be able to see a patient's medical history at a glance, so too are administrators given all of a student's data in real time, represented graphically rather than through an unwieldy spreadsheet.
Students and parents can access their grades and attendance records, updated instantly, through the student and parent portals of the program. Even grandparents, if they would like access, can have it. As all statistics are in the same database, all the data is up-to-the-second. Hawboldt joked that the parents who went to collect physical report cards at the school might be receiving out-of-date information, since those parents would have likely seen even more recent grades on their phone or computer.
But ultimately, the new system is most valuable because of how it agile it makes the school system in terms of student intervention. Teachers, parents and administrators are given student performance data instantly, and this empowers them to stop downward slides or encourage students who are bored in class.
"I don't know how we lived that long while saying that 'We'll tell you in two months whether your student is capable or not,'" Hawboldt said. "If a kid's having issues, we want to start fixing those within the week. Week one is maybe too early. But week two isn't."
