Printed report cards will be discontinued after end of third grading period, to be distributed online

By Andy Yang
<[email protected]>

Save your third nine-weeks report card for posterity. The report cards that were distributed during SRT on March 21 will be the last printed one that students will receive. Starting at the end of this grading period this school will instead post grades on to myCCS, a process that will be similar to looking up grades, according to assistant principal Doug Bird.

“It’s actually pretty common,” Bird said. “A lot of colleges and other school districts, with the technology of this day and age, they make the information available online. The vast majority of our families have computers at home and can access the information there or at work or at the public library.”

Bird also said these changes should not come as a surprise as the administration has been considering this adjustment for quite some time now.

“We wanted to make sure that we had all of our grading aspects ironed out before we implemented something new,” Bird said. “We wanted to have a good understanding of how PowerSchool worked, so before we started rolling out to, in our case, 4,400 students. As far as not doing it later, I think a common question might be, ‘Why don’t we just start at the beginning of the school year?’ And, well, we did iron out those kinks and we feel comfortable with it. So, since we are comfortable with it, you might as well (begin the new system) as soon as you can and not waste that paper if you don’t have to.”

Junior Eric Zigon said he does not believe that these differences will have any substantial impact on students or their parents.

“Things really won’t be all that different, the only problem being people who don’t really have too much access to the Internet,” Zigon said. “But from a student perspective, this really sucks because now my parents will be able to find out my grades even earlier.”

Despite the new policy, Bird said parents and students who want a physical copy of their report card can simply request one from the school and pick it up later, but he believes the number of people who want a physical version will be limited because the electronic report card will contain all the information the printed cards used to have. Bird said that by doing this, the school hopes not only to eliminate costs for the school, but also to cut down on paper usage in order to participate more fully in environmental conservation.

“The kind of paper we use to print out report cards is a lot thicker, so yes it helps the cost, but it also helps the environment because you’re printing it out on thinner paper,” Bird said. “For example, I live in Fishers, and my kids go to Hamilton Southeastern; they do electronic report cards, so my wife and I can just pull up the report card for our third grader and get all the information we need. I would only print it out if there’s something that I need to refer to if I was calling a teacher or counselor. I think it’s just going to save quite a bit on paper.”

According to Bird, parents and students will be notified about the change with a message on the third grading period report cards, providing instructions on how to access the information later. However, no letter will be sent, as that would defeat the purpose of switching to a paperless report card system.

Bird said, “This is definitely a positive thing, it’s just the direction that we’re headed and everything is done electronically. I mean, people buy tickets and a lot of other things online, so it should not be a problem.”