Minneapolis schools' Parent Portal is a winner

Counterpoint

Unlike Beth Ewen ("I Was a 'Parent Portal' Dropout," June 1), I am a frequent user on the Minneapolis public schools' parent portal, and I love it.

In fact, I feel that the online grade-reporting system is the single greatest thing that the district has done for me as a parent. I believe it makes me a better parent and my children better students.

The parent portal allows my wife and me to see assignment grading and attendance information in almost real time. We look at our children's reports multiple times per week, and most of the time what we learn on parent portal leads to nothing. We don't hound our kids about every missing point, and we don't call the school about every poor grade.

Instead, we use parent portal to help our kids learn how to navigate the school system and to fill in some of the gaps in information about what is happening in their lives, gaps that have become wider and more numerous as our kids have become teenagers.

Through the portal, I have learned about interesting events in my children's lives. Occasionally, the school will allow one of my kids to be excused from a class, and the parent portal is the only way I learn about most of these absences.

In recent months, I learned that one class was missed for an awards ceremony, another for a student council meeting and another for a choir event. By asking my son about a missing assignment, I learned that it had been made up when he stayed after school one day.

The few times we have contacted teachers based on portal information, I've felt that our kids have benefited from it.

A couple of years ago, my son had a year-end project due that was a significant part of his class grade. He turned the project in the last day of school, and I looked up the grade a day or two later. To my surprise, he had received an F on the project, which dropped his class grade by one whole letter.

By this time, my son had launched into summer and had no interest in following up on the grading, so I e-mailed the teacher. She quickly replied, from her summer break, that the recorded grade was in error, and that my son had actually earned an A on the project. She changed the project grade and the class grade.

We talked about this with my son — about how a bookkeeping error had lowered his grade, but how a short note and a helpful teacher had quickly corrected the situation. My son was happy about the corrected grade and learned a lesson about how the system works. Ignoring the information on the parent portal would not have benefited anyone.

I do know that filling the parent portal with information requires a consistent effort from my children's teachers. At every school conference, I try to make a point of thanking them for their work in entering the grade information and of telling them how valuable I find it.

I believe that my children still need my help. If I can encourage them here and there and provide them lessons in how to successfully navigate the system, they will learn more and will be better equipped to navigate future systems they encounter. The parent portal online grade-reporting system provided by the Minneapolis schools is the best resource that I have to enable me to do that.

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