Scholastico PTC is the best way to organize registrations for parent teacher conferences. Every school has a parent conference at least once a year. But organizing those days can be a messy, time consuming nightmare of spreadsheets, emails, and paper forms.
With Scholastico PTC, parents sign themselves up for free slots with all their children’s teachers in just a few seconds. They can sign up for the best available slots to match their schedule.
Parents can sign up for conferences from their iPad, phone, computer, or any device they want.
The teachers know who had signed up so that they can prepare for the conference. The office staff and secretaries can see at a glance what each parents and teachers schedule for the day looks like without having to do the cumbersome and manual task of planning the day.
Who Benefits?
Parents get the most efficient schedule for their needs.
Teachers plan their own breaks and availability, and see the schedule of who has signed up, so that they can prep for the day. Teachers don’t have to do any of the work in constructing the day’s schedule.
School offices, secretaries, and administrators save hours PLUS they get positive feedback from happy teachers and parents.
Time Savings
If the school office is managing this whole day in a spreadsheet or on paper, they will spend days trying to organize it. No matter how they arrange it, it won’t be the most efficient for the teachers or families.
Trying to send individual schedules to families and teachers is messy and difficult. If the teachers are in charge of organizing their own day, the school ends up with dozens of experts, each wasting an hour trying to something that they are not an expert at.
If the school is using free survey or signup software to organize the day, parents will get different signup links from all the teachers who work with children, which can be messy and annoying. Plus, the data from all those sign ups ends up in different places, so the office can’t organize a master schedule from the different form results.
Scholastico PTC makes the entire process super efficient, easy, and fast. Parents, teachers and administrators are all going to be happy with the savings of time and effort.
Typical Questions
Can we offer early signup?
Yes, in many schools, parents with more than one child, or parents who work at the school, are offered early access. Scholastico makes that early access process easy.
What about part time teachers?
As part of the setup procedure, the office can book a break for everyone (like lunch) when no parents can sign up with any teachers. Also, teachers can book their own breaks, so they can have some time reserved for themselves. Teachers who won’t be available for the entire conference can simply book breaks for the time they are away.
Do parents see who else has signed up?
Privacy is very important for schools. When a parent looks at a teacher’s available time slots, they only see a list of possible times for booking that teacher. They never see the names of other parents or students, and they don’t see breaks that the teacher has booked.
What if a parent accidentally signs up twice?
When booking, a parent sees their current schedule, so they know what they’ve already signed up for. Timeslots which would cause a conflict are clearly marked so that parents don’t sign up for two of their child’s teachers at the same time.
What about parents with multiple children who WANT to attend two sessions at the same time?
It’s possible to sign up for a conference with the teachers of different children at the same time. This is convenient for large families where the father attends conferences with one child’s teachers while the mother attends conferences with the others. Families who want to arrange their days like that will be able to, without getting any errors about time conflicts.
We have unusual and specific needs. Can Scholastico handle them?
Scholastico is designed to take care of all sort of unusual conference needs. You can have timeslots of any length. You can have optional passing periods. You can have multiple simultaneous timeslots, if you want to have 2 or 3 student-led conferences in the same room at the same time. You can set those up with the same start time, or with slightly overlapping times. You can have two sets of timeslots, if homeroom teachers have longer appointments than single-subject specialist teachers.
Scholastico is very flexible to allow all types of parent-teacher conference schedules.