District 88 parents

get full access to

student information

Program lets

parents track

attendance, grades

By KREMENA TODOROVA

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- As of Oct. 1, all District 88 parents have full online access to their children's school information, District 88 Technology Director Jim Aufderheide reports.

Fully accessible districtwide for the first time, the new program, called Campus, allows parents to track grades, attendance, assignments, course expectations and other school, course and student-specific information, as soon as the information is posted online by school staff. All parents need in order to receive the information, after a set-up procedure, is a password, a web browser and access to the Internet. Parents can log on to the site any time of day or night.

The Campus program is also available to teachers, administrators, counselors, nurses and other authorized school staff -- each of whom may have access to different aspects of the data depending on their duties and needs.

Preparing for the latest expansion of usage, the District 88 technology office developed a package for parents, explaining the program and what it offers to families. It also wrote a document detailing the set-up process, with the use of codes and passwords, and a sheet with instructions. The package was mailed to all students' families in August.

Phone calls in the first two days of full access have been overwhelmingly positive, says Aufderheide. Parents have expressed satisfaction with the type and amount of information available, and the ease and timeliness of access. The very few requests for adjustments have focused on the accuracy of information entered -- such as correcting a student's address or adding the missed name of a parent.

Before making the program available to all parents, District 88 tested it with a pilot parent group. The technology office tried to select a representative sample of parents for the test group, by including parents from all school sites and different types of families.

The pilot group, which used the program during the past school year, reported their feedback at a follow-up meeting last spring.

Aufderheide says that very few adjustments were necessitated as a result of input from the test parents. Technical glitches were practically non-existent, and the few concerns had to do with teachers' timelines for posting grades, rather than the program itself.

As a result of the parents' input, for example, the District informed (mostly upper-level) teachers of the parents' expectation that grades should be reported on Campus within about 10 days of grading. The same expectation was listed in the documents that all parents received this year, to ensure uniformity of expectations.

(At the lower elementary level, where assessment procedures are different, a discussion is ongoing about how to report, and improve reporting of, teachers' assessments of students, Aufderheide notes.)

Moving to a districtwide reporting system has inevitably prompted a look at districtwide information collection and reporting procedures, Aufderheide notes. While in the past different school sites may have used somewhat different formats for data collection (address reporting, etc.), the use of the Campus program is suggesting a shift toward recording formats that would be easy and understandable for all users of the system.