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Joe Kohn of The Michigan Catholic
Published August 25, 2006

The majority of Catholic school parents these days use the Internet at home or at work to check on the news, community calendars or any number of other things.

Now, they're just a couple clicks away from finding out how their kids are doing in school.

Catholic schools across the Archdiocese of Detroit have latched on to the cutting-edge of educational technology with Web sites that give parents private access to their child's school calendar, homework assignments and even regularly-updated grades.

Photo by Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic Ben Hubeny, a student at Gabriel Richard High School in Riverview, has information from his teachers listed on a Web site called EdLine so his mother, Mily Hubeny, can check his grades, assignments and school calendar with the click of a mouse.

"This is the way I keep on top of things," said Mily Hubeny, who using a Web-based program called EdLine can see the assignments and weekly grades of her son, Ben, a sophomore at Gabriel Richard High School in Riverview. "If you have any questions, you can e-mail the teachers and they can either call or e-mail you the answer. And if he's falling off track, you can kind of say, 'Hey, what's going on? Do you need some help in this class?'"

Gabriel Richard assistant principal Joan Fitzgerald said implementing EdLine was a matter of using available technology to give parents what they want.

"It's a real good way for mom and dad to keep tabs on their children and keep that dialogue open with their teacher," she said. "If there is a problem, parents like to be on top of that problem."

At the same time, she added, Internet-based communications don't take the place of traditional means of parent-teacher communications. They still have regular newsletters mailed out to parents and conduct parent-teacher conferences, for instance.

EdLine – which operates through the Web site www.edline.com – is one of a handful of low-cost, Web-based tools designed to keep parents in touch with teachers. Many such programs also are used by public and charter schools across the country.

Several Catholic high schools in the archdiocese have implemented some form of Web-based communication between parents and teachers. And most high schools, and even some grade schools, have regular means by which parents can e-mail teachers.

"We know that successful students have active, involved parents," said Gabrielle Erken, principal of Shrine High School in Royal Oak. "This involves parents and it facilitates communications for parents and teachers. It keeps everybody on their toes."

Shrine did a survey with its parents and found that most of them had the Internet either at home or at their offices at work. For the 2006-07 school year, the schools will use a program called Discover Zone to have each of their teachers create their own Web sites. While many teachers at the high school previously had their own Web sites, this is the first year all the school's teachers will have uniform sites easily accessible to parents.

Of course, the sites aren't exclusively for parents, either. Noting that many colleges rely on online grading systems, class schedules and even chat forums by which teachers and students communicate, Erken said adding Web-based communications is just one more way to prepare students for college.

"It's where the future is," she said. "All the colleges have it that way, so we felt it was an obligation to take advantage of the technology that's available."

And for parents, having their child's grades and assignments available at the click of a mouse is proving popular.

"It worked great for me," said Debbie Zammit, who had two children at Gabriel Richard High School last year. "It is a good feeling. You pay a lot of money sending your kids to school, so it's just a good, reassuring feeling."