Why can’t parents sign up for teacher conferences electronically?
These days, we do practically everything on the internet. We shop, buy tickets for the movies, book hotels and flights. Every business has changed the way they operate to take advantage of the efficiencies that technology allows. Every business, that is, except for schools.
I created Scholastico to help schools run more efficiently.
I saw how difficult is usually is for a school to organize parent-teacher conferences, and have created an amazing solution for this huge problem.
When parent-teacher conference time rolls around, very few schools have sophisticated online booking tools at their disposal. It must be frustrating to be a tech-savvy parent in Avery County North Carolina, where a recent article in the newspaper instructed thousands of parents to use the telephone to book an appointment.
Some back-of-the-envelope math shows just how inefficient this is. There are over 2000 students in Avery County. Their parents were expected to attend conferences on the same day. Assuming that you could get through to a busy office, talk to a secretary, find out what times are available, choose the best one for your family’s schedule, and confirm that appointment in 90 seconds or less, that would still be 3000 minutes of secretarial time, or roughly 50 hours. More than a normal full-time employee’s workload for a school staff that is probably already busy running a school.
Telephone-based conference appointments, even for schools with thousands of students, are not uncommon. Other schools will manually assign all parents a random timeslot, then just send home a schedule, without allowing the parent any input in the process. Another common workaround is to ask every teacher to arrange conferences themselves, either through email or paper sheets. A recent article in Education World recommended that teachers enlist a student volunteer from their class to organize the conference, “act as your secretary” and “set up appointment times.” Some tech-savvy teachers have tried to put together their own sign-up sheet using Survey Monkey or Google Forms, but since these sometimes allow parents to double-book time slots, these workarounds often cause more harm than good.
Some schools simply throw their hands in the air and give up entirely on scheduling conferences. It’s very common to organize what are called “arena-style” conferences, where all the teachers set up on tables in a large area, such as the cafeteria.
Parents stand in line, waiting to meet briefly with each teacher. They might spend all day at the school in order to have a handful of brief meetings with the teachers who work with their children.
I think the solution we developed is an elegant and affordable alternative to these workarounds.
With Scholastico PTC, the school secretary does some simple setup — establishing the length of the timeslots on the conference day or days, and a passing time between appointments if necessary. They upload a list of teachers, parents, students, and classes. Then they send a mail merge to the parents. A parent is able to sign in with a simple click on a link. They don’t have to wade through the entire list of every teacher in the school — since the system was set up for them, they only see the teachers who actually work with their children. They are able to reserve a time to meet with each one. They can sign up quickly and easily, choosing times which are convenient for their own schedule. Our system is designed to be mobile-responsive, so it works on any browser or smartphone. We’ve engineered the entire system to be as efficient as possible, minimizing the number of clicks and making the whole process run smoothly.
In the past year, the number of schools who have started using Scholastico for their parent-teacher conferences has grown quickly. Each one reports that the process has worked well and that parents have given positive feedback. It’s not easy to change the way a school operates, but when parents, teachers, principals, and secretaries all agree that the system is an improvement; well, that’s the kind of improvement that everyone looks forward to.
