Schools across America celebrated Labor Day this weekend by sending parents fourteen online forms to complete before Tuesday morning.
The forms were designed to reduce paperwork.
Naturally, parents must first print one.
The new paperless student-information system asks families to confirm the same address in the registration portal, transportation portal, lunch portal, health portal, athletics portal, emergency-contact portal, and the portal created to explain why the other portals are not talking to one another.
District officials say the system saves time because parents now do the data entry themselves.
“We used to employ people to enter this information,” one fictional administrator explained. “Now families can enjoy the convenience of entering it seven times from home.”
To protect security, every portal requires a different password. One must contain a capital letter, a number, a symbol, a childhood nickname, and the exact name of the street where the parent finally lost faith in technology.
Parents who forget a password may click “Reset Password,” which sends an email to the address they are currently trying to update.
The district also launched a mobile app so parents can receive immediate notifications that a message is waiting in another app.
The entire process should take only ten minutes, provided the parent already knows the student ID number printed on the paper form the district stopped using.
Families who cannot access the portal may request assistance through the portal.
The district stressed that none of this creates additional work for parents. The work already existed. It was simply being performed by employees.
Now it has been modernized.
Officials chose Labor Day for the rollout because the holiday honors the dignity of work.
And apparently nobody was doing enough of it.
