Blogs

August 2, 2012

Collaboration Portals for Parents in K-12 schools

Parent Teacher Organizations or Parent Teacher Associations are an important part of the public school fabric in the United States. They act as a conduit between the parents and the Board of Education in each district as well as the channel of communication between parents and the Principal/Staff running a school. Research has shown that parent involvement and support for children has been critical to their success. The earlier the parent gets involved in their children’s education and growth, the more significant are the results.  Parent involvement has resulted in higher grades, test scores and graduation rates. In spite of the evidence, lack of parent involvement is a well known and huge problem in public schools. Parents are busy with the day-to-day grind of their lives and take a back seat when it comes to their child’s education. Easy access to information and ability to talk to other parents in […]
May 17, 2012

Self-service parent portal enhances communication in school community

LocalArq implemented a self-service portal for Franklin elementary in Summit, New Jersey. What is a self-service portal? Initially when websites were built, only programmers could build and upload the content to the website for others to view. Over time, software companies have built tools that enable non-computer folks to publish to a web page. With the help of a rich editor, it will enable a school parent in charge of communications in the community to simply edit a new post and voila, publish it to the column desired. The Franklin site has all sections of the home page driven in this manner. The editor chooses the column to update and publishes almost instantaneously to the website. This enables posting alerts, weekly news, changes to the schedule or any quick notes that need to be communicated to the entire community. Email alerts and notifications can only go so far in helping […]