Palo Alto High School has a new Infinite Campus policy and will update grades in more frequent intervals of every month, according to Principal Phil Winston.
Winston implemented this new system at the start of the 2012-2013 school year.
A group initiative from the Paly staff, the change is meant to increase communication between teachers, students and parents despite the growing size of the student body.
Having “about four weeks” between every report gives “increased communication … with students [about their progress], increased communication about students’ progress for parents, and it also helps every student from our highest-performing students to our students with lower grades,” Winston said.
According to Winston, staff members are optimistic about the new policy. He has not received any “negative feedback” from teachers.
“People [teachers] want to do as much as they possibly can for students,” Winston said.
Math teacher Herb Bocksnick is one of the teachers in support of the new policy.
“Obviously, it’s going to make teachers have to be more on top of things; there can’t be any long lags where there can’t be two, three, four weeks where things don’t get graded,” he said. “It makes it where you’ve got a couple more deadlines, … but at the same time it’s good because it forces us [to] … not get behind.”
Students also appear pleased with the new system. Junior Jensen Hsiao noted that the new system would make it easier for parents to follow their child’s grades.
“This will help people academically because it will get their parents more involved,” he said.
Senior Alex Markosian is pleased that the system will result in more up-to-date Infinite Campus grades because it “forces teachers to update grades.”
According to junior Angela Xu, teachers have been fairly diligent about updating Infinite Campus, and she does not see the necessity of makeing more frequent grade reports.
“It doesn’t really matter if they send it to me or not because we have Infinite Campus where we can always check our grades,”
Winston believes that the new policy speaks to the dedication and hard work of the Paly staff.
“This school is full of remarkable teachers,” he said. “If [the new system] doesn’t work, we will just find a way to make it better.”
Jonathan Friduss • Aug 22, 2012 at 6:33 am
this is beyond ridiculous.
way to increase the stress among students, and increase parent involvement where it is not needed.
If the administration truly wanted to increase involvement between teachers and students, the teachers would hand the students there grades each month, and make it voluntary for the students to show their parents. This would make the parents have to earn the students respect to get to see how his or her kid is doing in school. Instead, they are trying to abuse the fact that the average “Palo Alto Parent” is generally short sighted and grade crazed, and will try to abuse their kids mental state until every month the parent (not the student) “earns” a 4.0 to pin up on their refrigerator and mail to all their family friends (it becomes the parents ability to manipulate the student, then about the students ability to learn the material).
Maybe next year teachers can brand their students with the grades that they “earn”. n parents can be reminded what grade there kid has….EVERY SINGLE DAY. Now THAT would be communication!