Published: August 25, 2008 02:04 pm            

Parents sign up in droves for Portal

Eventually, all parents of Stillwater Public Schools students will have access to the Parent Portal. Eventually.

The Parent Portal was launched last spring to give parents access to their children’s academic records — grades, attendance, etc. According to Kevin Calvert, the district’s director of technology, parent participation at the high school was about 20 to 30 percent last year.

But now, the portal is available to parents of students at the three secondary schools and signups were, to put it mildly, much stronger at the beginning of the new year.

“We’re not measuring individual requests right now,” Calvert said, laughing. “We’re measuring the inches of paper that we’re going to have to complete.”

Calvert said he is shuffling staff to have more people working on creating new accounts and that work is scheduled to begin today. Calvert hopes the work can be completed within one month.

Parents who signed up for accounts last year should still have access, Calvert said, adding that will be the model for future years. Accounts will “roll over” each year so, as the district creates accounts for the first time and adds the elementary schools in coming years, the beginning-of-the-year crush will be limited.

“The good thing is once we get this year taken care of, we get the majority of the accounts taken care of,” Calvert said. “The only problem we’ll really have is the new middle school accounts every year and, once we get the elementary accounts, that’ll be taken care of. Then it will only be new students and lost passwords.”

Calvert said he will post the progress on creating accounts on the district Web site, www.stillwater.k12.ok.us. There is a menu on the left side of the home page and “Parent Portal” is the third item from the top. Accounts for high school parents will be completed first, followed by the junior high and the middle school.

Calvert said the district also is testing a system that uses e-mail to issue notifications, such as school closures due to ice or snow. Principals also are being trained and may soon be sending e-mails to parents on a regular basis.

“Parents should start seeing more information via e-mail,” Calvert said.

        

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