A Maryland school district is considering scaling back or eliminating parent teacher conferences, believing they ”eat up instructional time and create a scheduling nightmare for families.” At present parents in Frederick County have to prepare for five half-days of parent-teacher conferences, which means shortened school days, complicated child care arrangements and interrupted schedules. Closing school for a day for conferences would mean having to make up for an extra instructional day, which costs more than $1 million, school officials say.
“Eliminating conferences may resolve that problem and reduce the amount of instructional time that students lose,” Maryland’s Gazette.net reports. ”The impact of the change may not be significant because parents can check grades online and use e-mail to communicate with teachers every day, said board member Michael Schaden. ‘We all know in these times there are many ways for parents to communicate with teachers,’ he said. ‘If we can scale back on conferences, we may be able to make it easier for families.’”
Is this a first? Perhaps this practice has been adopted in other districts, but a quick Google search fails to find any other examples of districts completely eliminating parent-teacher conferences.
Update: While this district looks at scrapping parent-teacher conferences, a proposed law in Colorado would give workers up to 40 hours of unpaid leave each school year to attend parent-teacher conferences or other school activities.
