For the first time, parents in St. Johns County can keep tabs on their high school students with the click of a mouse.
Earlier this month the school district introduced Parent Assistant, a Web-based application which allows parents to view their child’s educational information via a password protected Web site.
"This is the first parent module that we’ve offered," said Bruce Patrou, the school district’s chief information and technology officer. "It enables parents to see a lot more information than they have in the past."
Parent Assistant is a part of the district’s eSIS student information system, a district-wide program has been in effect since 2004.
With Parent Assistant, parents can access student schedules, grades, current school year progress, attendance, emergency contact information, non-school days and class schedules. Additionally, this information is available in real time, so as long as teachers are updating the system parents can see their student’s progress virtually immediately.
"Its a huge step forward in communication," Patrou said. "It’s a greatly improved communication tool than we’ve ever had for parents."
With this new system, teachers have the option of leaving notes for parents. Parent Assistant has a message client allowing teachers to leave comments or messages about the students progress for parents and also allowing messages from the school to the parent. Additionally, Patrou said parents can update emergency contact information for students on the website. He said Parent Assistant was developed to give parents a better way to communicate with the schools.
Patrou said that the response from parents has been overwhelming. The district has already made presentations at Ponte Vedra High School, Nease High School and St. Augustine High School, and plans to visit the remaining schools soon to talk to parents about the project.
"We signed up 500 parents in one night at Nease," he said.
Parent Assistant is currently only available for parents of high school students, Patrou said, the district has no definite time line for when they will open the program to middle and elementary schools.
"If there is good system performance and no problems, it could be as early as a few months," said Patrou. "We will open it up as soon as we can based on good outcome."
October 1st 2008 - 2:19PM