A World of Information at a Parent’s Fingertips with the new Virtual Counselor

It’s Monday morning and Elinor Adler arrives at her office and powers on her desktop computer. Before diving in to the pile of work she has ahead of her, she logs on to the Internet – but she’s not reading the day’s headlines or reading her E-mail, she’s checking to see how her daughter Lindsey, a high-school senior, is doing at school.

eschoolnews.com

Elinor regularly checks Lindsey’s grades, attendance record, test scores, class rank and more with the new Broward Schools Virtual Counselor.

"One day Lindsey and I logged on to the Virtual Counselor and noticed that her grade point average was incorrect," Adler said. "We realized that the school was still averaging in a lower grade she received – even though she re-took the class and got a much higher grade the second time around."

She and her daughter brought the oversight to the attention of her school’s guidance counselor and the error was quickly corrected. "If it wasn’t for the Virtual Counselor we may have never noticed the mistake." Many parents want to keep up with how well their child is doing in school. The Virtual Counselor is the perfect tool because parents can use it whenever they have the chance. All parents need to do is log on to http://www.browardschools.com and a few clicks later, they’ve got the info they are looking for. If they find something out of the ordinary, they can then schedule an appointment with a school guidance counselor.

"We recognize that the parents of our 270,000 students lead very hectic lives and don’t always have the time to visit a school to see how their children are progressing. With the Virtual Counselor – we are bringing the school to the parents to make it easier for even the busiest parents to become more involved in the education of their children," said Superintendent Frank Till.

The Virtual Counselor is the latest service to stem from the Broward County Public Schools and IBM Reinventing Education grant partnership. IBM’s Reinventing Education grant helped Broward County design and develop a data warehouse that collects and analyzes school-based data, offering teachers and district and state administrators quick and easy access to vital information.. For most schools, managing reams of data so that it provides greater insight is a time-consuming and difficult challenge. Broward County’s data warehouse solves this problem by transforming data into information.

"The Virtual Counselor gives secure, real time information to local students and parents. It is a great example of how the leading edge technology and business insight provided by IBM’s Reinventing Education program can support families and public schools," said Stan Litow, IBM’s vice president of community relations.

http://www.eschoolnews.com
[email protected]
7920 Norfolk Ave., Suite 900
Bethesda, MD 20814
(800) 394-0115 – Fax (301) 913-0119