Peabody schools to put attendance records online

PEABODY-While students are spending their hot summer days riding bicycles or catching some sun at the beach, school administrators are hard at work upgrading the student management system.It took nearly two months, but teachers will soon be able to file and look up a student?s attendance record. With the help of a $26,000 federal grant, all schools across the Peabody public spectrum have been upgraded to allow for “better tracking and reporting capabilities,” said Superintendent Milt Burnett.?At the moment, we?re very much so a pen and paper driven system,” he said.Burnett explained that elementary school teachers take attendance on paper and use interoffice mail to transport the information to the central office in the Kiley Administration Building, where the files were kept. If they ever need a copy of the attendance, they have to call the attendance clerk and ask them to either print it out or fax it over – quite the process for something that other area schools do with ease.What Burnett calls “real time attendance” will require some training for elementary school staff to use, but he expects all schools to individually house their own electronic records shortly into the year.His ideal goal, however, is to allow parents the same access via the Internet. Burnett said he and his staff have plans to create a web-based program that gives parents an up-to-date look at how their child is performing in school, both academically speaking and in terms of attendance. And, with the groundwork already in place, he said it would only take about a year for that to happen.?Want to know if your child is in school that day? As a parent, you can log in to see,” said Burnett. “Other districts already have it, a parent portal?We?re still a year away yet.”What isn?t a year away, and will in fact occur at some point during the 2008-2009 school year, is a point of pay system for school meals. Burnett said they will test a program that allows parents to add money to their child?s meal card, rather than sending them to school with cash every day. It?ll begin with one school, most likely the Higgins Middle School, before spreading out to the others.