Wrong Number, 174,000 Times

One night last week, we got a disconcerting phone call. An automated message from our daughter’s high school informed us that she had been absent without permission. Translation: Your kid’s been skipping school! The recorded message told us to explain, in writing and within 24 hours, why she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

That would have been fine, except my daughter hadn’t skipped school. True, she had missed a class. But like all the other 10th- graders, she had spent from 7:30 a.m. until 10:30 a.m. in the gym taking the PSAT, which is a warm-up for the SAT college entrance exam.

I recount this story to raise a tiny red flag about the wonderful new technology school districts are buying to keep track of kids and/ or improve communication with parents. Palm Beach County schools are looking at a system that would create a computer-driven phone network with the ability to call the parents of all 174,000 students within 15 minutes. Amazing.

But ask yourself: Under what set of circumstances would the school district need to call the parents of all 174,000 students within 15 minutes? It’s possible,

I suppose, for 174,000 students to skip school on the same day. But I’m thinking that if that were to happen, the teachers and administrators should just enjoy a well-deserved rest and keep quiet about it.

With cellphones, text messages and instant messaging, all 174,000 students could communicate among themselves within 15 minutes – “Brad dumped Mary; no, Mary dumped Brad” – so maybe the district is just trying to keep up. But at $10 million to upgrade the phone system, the tech-lovers need a good reason to shell out the money. When you need an excuse to do anything in South Florida, such as raise insurance rates, building costs or fuel prices, there’s one foolproof answer: hurricanes.

So it’s suggested that the 15-minute system would enable school officials to notify parents when they have to cancel school because of a hurricane. That excuse doesn’t sell it for me. With newspaper Web sites, radio and TV, the district already has ample ways to notify parents quickly. A quick-dial automated system would just give decision-makers more cover to dither.

Before creating a system that can call all parents within 15 minutes, the district also might want to consider the possibility – Murphy’s Law says the certainty – of errors. The Branchburg, Va., board of education, for example, was proud of its automated calling system until, because of a programming error, it called voters at 3:30 on a Sunday morning to urge them to support the school’s proposed budget.

I can foresee the day when the parents of 174,000 students are told that their kid skipped school that day. Or the day an ace technology student programs the Dial-A-Parent to tell them school is canceled for Gwen Stefani’s birthday. The good news, when that happens, is that officials can correct the error within 15 minutes.

Another supposed selling point for Dial-A-Parent is that the network will enable all kinds of other interaction between parents and teachers. I’m in favor of that, but experience again calls for caution. My daughter’s school features Edline, which allows parents to log on and check grades and assignments. In theory.

I say “in theory” because just last week, the system blew up on one teacher and was reporting inaccurate grades. As with most high- tech tools, there’s also a learning curve. Some teachers keep Edline pretty well updated, but others barely post grades, much less assignments and other information. A fancy e-mail system linking phones and computers to grade databases – which the proposed system promises – will improve communication for some but is bound to be a barrier for others, particularly when it doesn’t work.

As a footnote, the district also is upgrading, for $651,000, technology for tracking buses and the students who ride them. Buses will be equipped with global positioning systems, and students will have ID cards that show when they get on and off buses. Cool. But is it really necessary? Maybe instead the district should buy a system that keeps track of students who go to the gym to take a scheduled PSAT.

Jac Wilder VerSteeg is deputy editorial page editor of The Palm Beach Post. His e-mail address is jac_versteeg@pbpost.com