It has taken all summer, but the new and improved Eastport South Manor School District website, esmonline.org, is up and running.
Geraldine Doherty, the district’s director of technology, explained during a Board of Education meeting earlier this month that the upgraded webpage features individual links to all the schools in the district. Previously, the entire ESM website was handled by Kasey Cheung, a computer repair technician. Now, principals and teachers of each school will be responsible for designing and updating their individual pages.
“It’s so much easier this way,” said South Street Elementary Principal Dr. Robin Barbera. “Before I’d have to e-mail my changes to Kasey, and then he’d update the website. Now I can just do it myself.”
The website also offers parents more interaction with teachers, who will have their e-mail addresses and phone numbers posted on the site.
The school district chose School World, a professional web page design firm in Rochester, to create and host the new website at a cost of $4,000 per year. One of the new features on the district website is a home page portion devoted to flagging users with important information, such as school closings.
“This is going to cut down on paper, cut down on mailing, cut down on toner,” said Superintendent Mark A. Nocero. “As we try to get our staff to be paperless, we’re going to move this year to try and get our community to be paperless as well.”
The website also offers Parent Portal, which ostensibly provides parents an extra set of eyes—digital ones—to see what their kids are up to at school. While the system will include basic information, such as household members, addresses, phone numbers, student schedules and links to teacher e-mails, the clincher is that parents will be able to see immediately if their kids have skipped a class, or an entire day of school, and also keep track of student grades—past and present.
Parents, students and faculty can log in and access a variety of information, including textbooks, financial aid information, and even the weather. The portal can also be used to register for classes, confirm attendance, update addresses, and submit grades, student assessment data on state exams and state Regent’s exams.
One highlight of Parent Portal is that the system is capable of providing information on student behavior in real time, meaning that once information is entered, it is immediately accessible. Report cards and progress reports will be available online immediately following the close of grade periods. Therefore, parents can see their child’s reports online before they receive them in the mail or pick them up at parent conferences.
Parent Portal also keeps track of parents who have e-mailed the district. Their e-mail addresses are instantly stored, and teachers and faculty can e-mail them back directly.
Board of Education Vice President Vincent Sweeney expressed concern that teachers and principals might not keep their websites up to date. “Things tend to start out where everybody’s involved and, as time goes by, it’s not as current,” he said. “It only takes one or two times for a parent to go and not get current information and use the excuse ‘I’m not going there anymore because it’s not current.’”
Ms. Doherty responded by saying that principals, teachers and secretaries are receiving ongoing training with the new website, and all have technical support at their disposal.
“We’ve been pretty successful so far,” she said, “and I would really like to think that we will continue that.”
on Sep 4, 2008