The Day Before Open House

Thursday was a long day for me as I attended a 3 hour meeting for ethics training and completed 8.5 internship hours.  My first task was to create and print QR codes for each teacher's door prior to Open House.  The QR codes would link the parents and students to the teacher's webpage.  Since we are a technology-rich school, I thought this would be a wonderful idea to get everyone connected.  After double checking that the QR codes were correctly linked, Lisa and I hung them outside each classroom.  More updates on the codes in a little bit!

After posting the QR codes, Lisa and I started pulling and sorting the registration data.  I have to admit, when working with data of this size (2,000 students) things get stressful!  It amazed me how many parents don't know their child's student number or even which school the child attends.  One parent registered their child on our site when the child actually attends another school not even in our cluster.  This process took awhile as we had to look up the student to correct the wrong IDs.  After the data was corrected, we had to sort the lists into those that were missing any of the following:  immunization, registration card, or MyPaymentsPlus (lunch money and contributions).  While sorting the data there were several times that we had to double check numbers to make sure no one was left out.  It was crucial that students had to be either on the "completed" or "not completed" lists.  If they were on the "not completed" list, we had to determine what was needed for completion.  When it was all said and done, we had 399 students that had not completed all steps of the registration process.  I was amazed!  How can so many people not do something that is so easy??  

So after the lists were made and printed, Lisa and I headed to the main office where we met up with the principal, 6th grade assistant principal, the curriculum and instruction assistant principal, and some of the front office staff to begin the sorting process.  Our task was to sort each and every homeroom into two stacks:  completed and not completed.  The lists of the students that had completed registration included homeroom teachers, so they could proceed to Open House and receiving their schedule.  If the student's name was not on the posted list, they head to the appropriate location to finish registration and then proceed to homeroom.  Whew!  What a process!

At the end of Thursday, I was not only overwhelmed by this process but also in awe of how efficiently all the data was sorted.  While I'm not yet confident to execute this process myself, I gained much insight on all that goes on during registration.

Time logged on 8/2:  8.5 hours
Total time logged:  10 hours