Start School With a Click

By Rebecca Winters

Getting ready to go back to school in the good old days of, say, 1997 meant a few trips to the mall, a quick check of the bus route and a thorough sweep of the stationery aisle. This year, for many parents, there are some new things to remember: the teacher's e-mail address, the school's website or which night online homework help chat will be offered. "The 1999-2000 school year will be the one where the majority of parents really feel the Internet's influence on their child's education at the everyday level," says Jonathan Carson, chairman and ceo of the Family Education Co., based in Boston, which offers an informational parenting website at familyeducation.com and a framework for local schools to create and maintain their own sites.

In some schools, last year provided a hint of what was to come. This year promises to show a quantum leap in the spread of school technology: parents in many districts can expect to be able to check the school lunch menu, read class notes, see activity calendars and, perhaps best of all, view nightly homework assignments--all online. "The schools are wired," says Carson. "A majority of parents now have access, and the educators are ready to go."

Over the summer, parents of high school German students in Ithaca, N.Y., got to be part of a class trip to Europe, through their home computers. The class brought a digital camera and laptop with them to Germany and documented their visit on their web page. Harry Ash, father of 16-year-old traveler Brian, found it reassuring to see his son's smiling face from half a world away. "It gives me great comfort," Ash says, three days into the monthlong trip. "Brian's staying with a family that doesn't speak much English. This is new to him." Before their kids left, parents checked the site for scheduling information, a list of activities and advice on cultural differences. There were some glitches along the way (at one point, the digital photo files weren't transmitting properly). But this new virtual connection between parent and school is a strong alternative to the paper memos Carson calls "backpack mail," about one-third of which never makes it home on any given day.

When it's designed well, a district, school or classroom website can significantly change the relationship between the parent and the school, says Cynthia LaPier, Ithaca's director of information and instructional technology. "All the research says that the more you can involve parents in school, the better," LaPier says. "The technology gives us another way to reach them, especially parents of secondary school students, who tend to be less involved."

Ithaca high school physics teacher Steve Wirt gets e-mail from parents regularly, some from moms and dads he believes might otherwise not pick up the phone with a concern. Using software called Blackboard CourseInfo, designed to make website building intuitive for teachers, Wirt conducts online chats with his students, often reviewing for a quiz or discussing homework problems.

But Ithaca may not be the average place to take high school physics, or to parent: physicist Carl Sagan sent his children through the district that shares its small city with enormous Cornell University. That doesn't mean every family in town has a computer in the home. Ithaca has discussed opening its computer labs to parents and the community after hours. "We need to make sure we're not just reaching a fraction of the population," LaPier says. And parents do express concerns about their child's privacy, as well as access to inappropriate material online. But they're coming around, LaPier says.

The way things are going, by the end of this year, many parents may be fully converted--and in fact dependent upon their schools' technological capabilities. At a recently wired school in Novi, Mich., the school webmaster was just a few hours late posting the lunch-menu calendar on the website, which was created with the help of Carson's Family Education Co. In that time, more than a dozen parents called him to request the information. "A year ago, it never would have been there," says Carson. And now parents are finding it's tough to get by without it.