Our Position: LT should not send home weekly grade reports

After Labor Day, LT started emailing parents weekly progress reports, which provide weekly snapshots of students’ current grades to decrease absentee rates. We at LION believe there are better options for solving attendance issues that don’t involve perpetuating tensions between students and parents. 

We’ve all been there, forgetting for one reason or another to do an assignment or doing poorly on a test. Then we are confronted by our parents. Understanding of grades is already a massive cause of disconnect between parents and students. Students will always better understand the circumstances that got them their grades; parents, on the other hand, struggle. This misunderstanding between parents and students leads to an overemphasis on certain aspects of grades that are often redundant. 

One of the biggest misconceptions of formative grades is that parents often don’t understand how formative assignments work. For example, if a formative homework assignment wasn’t turned in on time and marked as missing, parents will often think the situation is worse than it actually is. This process of parents berating students for minuscule assignments is a cycle that is unproductive for a student to endure. 

So while LT’s intentions with progress reports aren’t to bring harm to students, it comes off this way. 

The main goal of progress reports is to improve attendance rates. According to a LaGrange Patch Article, “part of the inspiration is the school’s number of absences.” This brings up the question: why can’t the school email parents information about just attendance related information instead of grades?

These progress checks bring thousands of innocent students into a crossfire of tension with their parents and seem to have no real connection to attendance policies. It would be just as effective if the parents, specifically the ones who have students getting tardies and absences, were directly notified every time an absence or tardy was recorded.

To be clear, LT already allows parents to access grades via the Infinite Campus app. Parents can already access grades at any time or place of their choosing. All that these weekly grade updates do is create unnecessary weekly conflict between parents and students. 

High school students already have a lot to deal with. Weekly battles with parents shouldn’t be one of them. If LT’s main goal is to bring awareness to absences and tardies, then there are an ample amount of opportunities that don’t involve crippling a student’s independence, along with their relationships with their parents.