The High School Council is elected by the PA membership and consists of four Co-Chairpersons who are elected for two year terms.

The 2009-2010 High School Council Members Include:

Please contact any of the above HS Council members if you would like to volunteer for Parent Association sponsored activities taking place in the High School or in other areas of the Lab School.

High School Council Important Meeting Dates

Additional informational meetings will be scheduled throughout the year and will be posted on the Parents Association website (http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/parents/), in Lab E-News and other e-mail communications.

We invite all parents to attend the Parents’ Association Meetings that are held in Judd 126 at 7:00 p.m. Dates for the 2009-2010 meetings are posted in the All Schools Calendar on the school’s website.

High School Babysitters Needed For Lab Families

If your son or daughter is interested in babysitting for Lab families, please have them sign up in the High School Office. This list is distributed to the Nursery/Kindergarten and Lower School Offices for Lab parents and will not be made available electronically. It is the Parent Association’s intention that this list only be distributed to and used by Lab families but there may be a possibility that names on this list will be shared with others outside the Lab community who are also looking for babysitters. Click here for a copy of the application form.

PowerSchool Online Gradebook - a Message from the HS Principal

Recently several parents have expressed interest in having the online gradebook feature of PowerSchool made available to parents and students. Making this feature available to parents and students would allow them to monitor daily homework, quizzes, tests, and papers whenever student work is graded and recorded in the online gradebook. In essence, this would be analogous to allowing each student and his/her parents to view a teacher’s gradebook to see all of his/her grades on any graded assignment.

At Lab, we currently use PowerSchool for all grading, comment writing, and student registration, and we have the ability to turn on the online gradebook feature, which has password protection to ensure security. Several public schools use PowerSchool or similar software and make the open gradebook feature available to parents and students.

The U-High faculty and I have devoted significant time to discussing the open gradebook feature. After several meetings on the topic, the faculty voted unanimously not to use the online gradebook feature, and I wholeheartedly support this decision.

Some of the reasons for this decision include the following:

The argument for not having such a feature focused mainly on communication with parents. There are already a number of ways that faculty communicate with families about student progress. There are midterm reports, sent home after the first half of each quarter. Grades then are sent home at the end of each quarter. Additionally, faculty write interim comments at any point in the school year for students who are struggling in their courses. Parents also meet with faculty during the fall Open House and during the Parent Teacher Conferences in November. Finally, parents can also communicate with faculty at any point in the school year via email, the phone, or scheduled one-on-one meetings.

The second argument for not turning on the online gradebook feature centered on the current student culture at U-High in which the focus on grades is high. Faculty understand that students feel pressure to succeed academically in order to be competitive candidates for college admissions.

However, the online gradebook feature may very well enhance this focus on grades and the pressure students feel while also moving more attention on to grades while taking it away from actual learning.

Further, faculty expressed a concern that turning on such a feature will limit critical discussions that occur among parents, teachers, and students. Rather than simply checking in on students online, parents and their children now interact and discuss the information that students have. And, of course, teachers are also available for information when parents and students need it.
Finally, as a high school we need to strike the balance between providing ample information to families and allowing young adults some independence, which they will have in abundance in college. Most colleges only provide grades to parents with the students’ permission. A daily check on students’ homework and quizzes by their parents prevents us from helping students become the responsible people we want them to be when they graduate and head to college.

Please contact me if you have unanswered questions about this topic.

Matthew Horvat