No more excuses

 

Before his one-on-one tutorial, Eddie Hosteen had little idea how his actions were affecting his grandsons' education.

Until March 19, when staff at Wingate High School showed Hosteen how to log into the school's student information system, he didn't think letting his three grandsons drive themselves to school was a problem.

But the system, which was created in 2005 and contains grades, attendance and daily homework details, showed that his grandsons had missed school the previous day, and were also AWOL for the first class that morning.

"This is my fault, too," said Hosteen, 75, whose grandsons lived with him. "But now I have found out, I have the proof."

During the course of a 30-minute tutorial, Hosteen checked the student profile for each boy. The system is continuously updated, so he could see their homework assignments for the day.

"This is a 'right now' type of thing," said Dick Viekman, network manager at Wingate High, who helped design and implement the system.

The attendance page shows a diagram of each student's daily class schedule in blocks assigned to each hour of the school day. For Hosteen's oldest grandson, March 18 was colored yellow, meaning he missed the entire day.

On March 19, the first block was colored yellow, meaning he'd missed his first class that day.

"This is good to know, I like that," Hosteen said. "Now they won't fool around with me again."

Viekman offered the March 19 tutorial for all WHS parents and guardians, but only four showed up. Of those who did, only one has regular access to the Internet. The remaining three, including Hosteen, said they had access at their local chapter houses.

Because of their computer inexperience, Viekman explained the basics of the program.

Parents are first supplied with a login ID and a password through Viekman's office. This protects their student's information.

"It's not open to the whole wide world and anybody can see everything," Viekman said.

The main page is dense with links to other pages, but once the essential links become familiar, it's relatively easy to find the vital information.

The system has a calendar page, with each school day divided into five class periods. This page shows alerts, such as an "A" on a date when a student was absent or missed a class.

"H" means homework has been assigned for a particular class.

The example Viekman pulled up showed that the student had Algebra homework assigned that night. Three assignments were due the next day.

The system also includes links to testing data. This includes state and national standardized exams, and shows how the student scored individually and compared to other students in the same grade level.

Louise Jim was particularly grateful of the system. Her daughter, Tiffany, graduated from WHS in 2007, and Jim said she used the system to keep track of Tiffany's school record during her junior and senior years.

Jim said attendance became an issue during Tiffany's senior year.

"It kept her in line," Jim said of the computer-based oversight. "She used to get mad at me, but she started doing her homework."

As for Hosteen, who was so new to computers that he started the evening holding the computer mouse upside down, said he will regularly check the system for his grandsons' updates. Based on their progress, he'd make changes at home accordingly.

"I learned a lot," Hosteen said. "That machine can tell if a kid is missing two hours, a whole day or half a day. That machine tells everything."

"I'm going to use that from now on. There won't be any excuse."

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