At last, you can set quantifiable individual and organizational goals for parental involvement and, with very little administrative effort; you can manage your individual and organizational progress toward achieving those goals. SIMPL™ to the rescue!
SIMPL’s™ Parental Involvement Module provides the capability for a school to collect and retain data, and to aggregate teacher, school and district level reports that finally provide a capability to quantify and manage Parental Involvement.
The on-line collection process can be performed directly by each teacher, or indirectly with information given by teachers to a central data clerk for logging into the system. Anybody who has tried to keep parental involvement numbers understands the complexities involved. For instance;
- An ARD meeting is not the same as
- Conducting a “Parenting Skills” class, or
- Saying “hello” at a PTA meeting, and that is different than
- A Parent/Teacher conference and different even more than
- A phone call or a letter.
All these require different levels of effort from a teacher, but all need to be counted. SIMPL™ is not so pretentious as to propose any sort of composite number representing over-all parental involvement, but we do count the occurrences of each major type of encounter, when it occurred, which teacher to credit, etc., and then we produce some basic reports to help manage this vital area of school performance.
We encourage our clients to let the teachers use the on-line capability to record the information. It costs a little more, but it’s much easier for a teacher to click a few buttons each week and be done with it than to manually fill out a form and get it to the person who might not have time to look at it. As a teacher, you will see the evidence of your efforts reflected on your record every week. And it’s less work than you’re currently investing to get it done.
SEE ALSO: Community Connections
