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…

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.

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?

The scene is crazy. For our local high school, the number of parking spaces at the school does not allow for every single student (even in just one grade) to have a car parked nearby. So, the cars extend into the surrounding neighborhood, and since there is only one street that passes by the school, the traffic jam is something to behold. Is there a better way?

Once inside, the lines are long, and the parent volunteers who man the various stations are relatively uninformed. So are the parents. One parent, after waiting 35 minutes in line was told, sorry, you can’t get your schedule until you pay the book return fee and return the book. This parent, turns to his kid and says “Where is the book?”. The kid, says, “It is on my desk at home”. So, the parent, obviously now feeling late for work, pays the full price of the book, $195, vs. the $70 late fee. Why didn’t he just return home? Who knows? Is there a better way?

The longest lines have to be at the counselor’s table, where they go nose to nose with kids who want to drop, change, switch, or just complain about the classes they received. The most amusing part is watching the parents try to jockey for influence with the counselors to get what they think the kids should have. One parent was overheard making the following argument about why her daughter should be in Integrated Math 3 vs. Integrated Math 2 as a freshman. “You are damaging my daughter’s sense of confidence by putting her in the easy math class. I am sure the school board will take a dim view of this type of blatant abuse”. Now, why would the school board care about this? The counselor tried to explain that the student already had two “tough” classes that semester. Wouldn’t the daughter be better off and more successful with Integrated Math 2? The parent informed the counselor that she knew her daughter much better than the counselor did. The counselor looked at the 20 deep line of kids behind the mother, shrugged her shoulders, and agreed to make the change. Is there a better way?

Wouldn’t it make sense to have done all of this online? Give every parent the choice of paypal or credit card for the fees? Let them interact with counselors using chat, perhaps even video chat. Better yet, give parents and students limited ability to make schedule changes themselves. Isn’t this what almost every college kid does now?

But, aren’t there things that have to be done in person, such as checking gas bills to prove the family lives at the place they say they do? Create an on-line way to send in a scanned copy of the gas bill. How about the picture of the kid for student ids? Send one in via the web. Or, create a link to facebook where the photo can be downloaded? Why pay a company to take the photos? Give out the id card at school the first day.

The main point is that there are a ton of alternatives to the craziness of schedule pickup day. But, perhaps all the craziness is an important part of the school experience? Maybe lots of people look forward to it? Nah.