Aris Parent Link

I got my letter from the DOE welcoming me to the ARIS Parent Link tool, so I thought that I would try it out.
I logged in at www.ARISParentLink.org with my student's id# and the temporary password that was sent in the letter. If you don't know your child's id#, check on a report card. It is the same nine digit number that follows them all the way from kindergarten. I have a file that I keep school documents in (report cards and test results) and I write the number on the outside of the folder along with the phone numbers of the Parent Coordinator, Guidance Counselor and main school phone number. When my kids only had one teacher I would put the teacher's contact info there too for easy access. Now they have too many teachers to keep track of and I have to do an excel spreadsheet if they are inclined to give contact information.

It was easy to access the website and I didn't see anything that I didn't expect. The Regents scores were there and the days we took her out of school to visit our friends in Brazil. The 3rd - 8th grade standardized scores were there also, as well as her grades. I appreciate that I can access the information online to check that it is correct, and if I had a different child that wasn't always waving printouts of her "permanent record" in my face I would see things that might be new to me.

I am curious to hear from 4th grade parents to find out if the current ELA or Math scores are listed on their reports. It would be a helpful site if parents could have fast access to that information. I have to say that the most helpful sites have been two from my high school student's school. One is an email listserve that sends oneway messages from the school. As an incentive for signing up we recieve our student's report cards as a email a day early. I love that, because I might never see it otherwise. The other was an experimental site that a teacher set up that had accurate and timely grades listed throughout the semester; what homework was missing and how the essay or exam went. I find that often the report cards are too late to help with finding a tutor or contacting a teacher with a problem. When I knew how she did on the big test before she got home it helped me prepare - "congratulations!" or "I've cancelled soccer so that you can study" or to the teacher "is there a reason that the grades are all over the place?". For the most part, I didn't say anything. I didn't want her to think that I was tracking her every move, and I wasn't, but it was good to be prepared to help when it was needed. I am sure that it was a lot of work for the teacher to enter the many test and assignment grades, but I really appreciated it.