The other night was back to school night at our local high school. It is a twice a year ritual at our school because the school has a block schedule and each half-year term is like a full year of a particular course. The format is a series of 10 minute talks by the teachers organized by period. For example, the period 1 classes go first, etc.

I am amazed at the chaos this evening causes in most families in our area. First off, forget about being able to get both parents to attend. There are so many other activities – sports, jobs, etc. that one parent usually tries to go and the other is assigned taxi duty for the evening.

Second, the parking is crazy. We live in walking distance so my wife gets to go on over, but for about 1 mile away from the school building there are cars parked in dangerous positions along the road.

Third, there is nothing done by the school to make accommodations for multiple kids in the school so that a parent can meet their child’s teachers. The event is organized around periods with passing periods and a general time to see the library and other resources like the theater. However, if you have two kids in the high school, you can’t be in two places at once. Many parents try to be tactical with other parents who they know share a class with one of their kids. The old “can you go and take notes for me?” idea.

To me, the whole idea is kind of broken. One objective is to let the parents know what they can expect from the class. This is a good idea. A second objective is to let the parents see the teacher up close and personal and to let the teachers see the parents. This is also a good thing. A third objective is to let the parents know how they can help the teachers; help in this case could be monetary, time in the classroom, or just working with the students at home. Again, a really good thing.

But, the idea of giving each only 10 minutes to do all of this just does not work anymore in this day and age. Better in my mind to empower each teacher by giving them a blog site and software to do a video podcast. Parents without computer or Internet access can be given a DVD with all the podcasts on it to play in their DVD player. Then, the school can put together a reception where the teachers can hang out to meet the parents in a more informal setting. Perhaps there can be weekly town hall meetings with a few teachers rotating into the town hall to answer questions.

The blog sites and the podcasts can be a constant resource for the parents, who will probably forget most of what the teacher said anyway.

On the devil’s advocate side, I know there are many people who are bemoaning the lack of human contact engendered by digital media / tools. School seems to be a last bastion of the good old days and they don’t want to tinker with the format of things too much. But, there is no reason why things can’t be done to augment the current format to at least help parents who want the information, but can’t make it back to school.

For me, this is a better way…

Recently, I had the opportunity to interact with a parent user of our web service over a series of emails.  The contact was initiatied by the parent using the Feedback link in our product.  Her (at least I think it was a her) point in the feedback message was about adding the ability in Connected.info for a step-parent to be treated as a parent in Connected, but not with exactly the same privelages that a parent had.  This peaked my curiousity and I sent an email asking a few questions about her concern and a proposal for what we might do about the situation.

This sparked a series of emails which really illuminated the issue for me.  Before I describe the issue, I would like to compliment the parent on having a very good attitude about the validity of the involvement of a step-parent in a child’s life.  I thought her attitude was refreshing.

That said, here is the situation.  The custodial parent (the one who wrote the note) has remarried and the step-parent in the household with the child would like to have access to the features of Connected that allow the viewing of grades and homework assignments for the child.  The non-custodial parent also has remarried, and the new spouse of that parent would also like the same visibility.

In Connected.info, we drive a lot of our relationships and group memberships from the data stored in the student management system.  We do this to make Connected.info more immediately useful for a user.  The idea being that if there is less configuration to do on the part of the user, there is more perceived value in the software.  Some student management systems do a better job at identifying parental and legal guardian status than others.  In the case of Powerschool, many schools use the “custom field” capability of that student management system to note “special” relationships where they exist.  So, it is possible for Connected.info to identify step-parents when the school district notes them.

But, what if the school district does not note them?  How would such a relationship be identified and an appropriate user status be given to a step-parent in Connected.info?  The request that the parent I interacted with had was to allow her to grant “parental” status to another user.  There are some advantages to that, but shouldn’t the non-custodial parent have a say in whether this was ok?  What if there are court orders preventing the non-custodial parent’s spouse from having access?  This turned into a thorny issue.

The second issue we discussed was the issue of how much access to grant, and specifically, what was seen on the “family calendar” by the step-parents.  I explained that the “family calendar” was essentially a view of events present on individual family members calendars and any groups those users belonged to.  So, then, the question of what constituted the family came up.  Is the family the superset of the custodial parent’s household AND the non-custodial parent’s household?  Clearly, there are issues with that.  Is the “family” then the set of events that only the child is involved in?  That is probably not complete enough a set of events.

What seemed to be the best solution was for the “family calendar” of the custodial parent’s household include events from the individual members of the household and the groups they belong to, but not events that only appear on the non-custodial parent’s household members calendars.

One last issue that came up was that of the child’s calendar view.  Since the child is both a member of the custodial parent’s household as well as the non-custodial parent’s household, shouldn’t their “family calendar” view show all the events from both households?  That is, when they sign in as themself, what evens show on their calendar?  The parent I was interacting with via email agreed that a combined view was appropriate for the child.  In fact, she felt that there was value in both parents being able to see events scheduled by the other parent that affected the child.  However, privacy issues would normally prevent that from being practical.

I found this a fascinating conversation about an area that really does not get enough attention in school oriented software.

I know, I know, I should just worry about my own kids and not feel frustrated by the amount of drug use and cigarette smoking that happens on K-12 school campuses.  As long as my kids don’t do it, it is the school administration’s problem, isn’t it?

Well, I can’t just let it go.  Sorry.  When I drive up to my local high school to pick up my daughter and there are literally dozens of kids smoking right next to the “This is a smoke free campus” sign, it ticks me off.  Aren’t those teachers walking right past the kids?  Why didn’t they say something, or at least shake their fingers at the kids?  But, they just ignored it.

I asked my daughter and she says the teachers “Don’t care” about it.  The teachers actually say that they are not paid to be babysitters.  Wow.

And, cigarettes are not the only thing smoked on campus.  During rallys when the kids are not really required to be at the rally but almost all of the teachers are at the rally, there are many kids that hang out “behind the buildings” to get high.  How do I know this?  My daughter told me.  I did make the classic parent mistake of saying “Why don’t you report them?”.  I got quite the look for that question and I remembered how it was when I was a kid and not being known as a “narc”.  Still, this is really a bad thing.  Where are the cops?

Well, I asked my daughter that question.  She said that lots of kids are busted all the time.  She said “Everyone does it.  Except me and my friends of course.”  There are so many kids on probation that the youth authority has to run extra anti-drug classes to keep pace with demand.

And, our high school is not alone in this.  What can be done?

Some of us who walk the earth are parents. A large percentage of this group have experienced the ups and downs of having children attend public school in the United States. A lot has changed over the years, but some things that should have changed have not yet done so. This series of postings will present a parent’s view of the state of K-12 education.

It is interesting to me as a parent the lengths to which schools are forced to go to “get a parents attention”. For example, consider the carrot and stick approach used to get a parent in to school to pay the back to school fees. The main event for the school is the paying of the fees and the imparting of information on the new school year. For the parent and the student, it is about getting the schedule of classes. The school withholds the schedule in order to get the parent or students in the door to make sure that they get the information that the school wants them to have.

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