Hi Everyone! I am conducting a very short survey to find out parent feelings about report card comments. This survey will be part of an in-service presentation coming up in another week.
What I need to know is:
Parents: Do you really read report card comments? What are your gripes with report card comments? What do you want to see in a report card comment?
This will be very helpful to me. Thanks!
Holly Strapulos
Welcome!
Even though you posted in the correct forum, you might want to repost this in the Parenting forums. This particular forum is rather slow…
Do you really read report card comments?
Yes, of course.
What are your gripes with report card comments?
My biggest gripe is when the comment comes as a surprise…if my child isn’t turning in work, tell me the second week of the term when you first notice the issue, not after the term ends. How are we to work on fixing the issue at that time!
Also, at our schools, the comments aren’t really written on the card, the teacher selects from a pull down menu of options. So personalized…is my child really “well organized” or is it simply the first thing that kinda fit from the menu?
What do you want to see in a report card comment?
Please remember where I’m coming from…school and educational needs can be rather intense with special needs children. I think report card comments are useless with a special needs child. I want to know problems in a timely fashion so we as a team can help the child fix them. I don’t need fluffy feel good comment like “XXX is getting better at stating his needs” I need specific feedback like XXX went from stating his needs 50% of the time to 70% of the time, so I can tell if XXX’s needs are being addressed. And some comments are so…useless…in themself. My younger child had a mini break down and, under a doctors supervision, missed almost 35 days of school. Towards the end of the year we finally got him back to school and he worked his behind off to get caught up and had perfect attention. Yet three teachers commented that he missed too much school that term. Duh, of course he did. D was really proud of how hard he worked to get caught up and stay in school even when stressed. No need for the teacher to state the painfully obvious.
Comments seemed to have use in elementary school. Now that my children are in middle school its a different ballgame. We often get conflicting comments on the same child from different teachers (ie one comments on how prepared he is while one says he needs to work on it). What am I to draw from this?
As you can tell, I’m not a fan of report card comments. We’ve gone to weekly e-mails from the teachers instead. (We being my family. We’ve written that into the IEPs. The school district still uses the regular drop down menu comments.)
I hope others can be more useful to you.
Barb