PARENTS and teachers will soon be able to go online to access students' school records at the touch of a computer key through a management system being developed for public primary level schools.

Test scores and attendance and disciplinary records of students will be easily accessed, as will the attendance and performance of teachers through the system currently being piloted in 10 schools.

The Jamaica School Administrative System (JSAS 7.0) software, which will take about two years to be rolled out to schools islandwide, was launched at Drews Avenue Primary School in St Andrew Thursday.

JSAS, among other things, tracks data at the school, class and student levels, and provides easy retrieval of student and teacher information as well as generating student reports.
United States Agency for International Development (USAID) mission director Dr Karen Hilliard told Career & Education that JSAS was a state-of-the-art system being used in the best school districts in the USA. She said depending on the policy developed by the Ministry of Education, parents could go online and find out how their child's school is performing compared to the school down the road. That puts pressure on schools to perform well by holding the schools accountable.
JSAS 7.0 is the latest upgrade of JSAS which was initially developed for schools involved in the Expanding Education Horizons (EEH) project, a joint initiative of the Jamaican and United States governments through the Ministry of Education and the USAID.

EEH seeks to enhance literacy and numeracy in 71 schools throughout the country that were initially performing poorly, as well as seven non-governmental organisations catering to at-risk children.

Minister of Education Andrew Holness called for the development of a culture of recording and reporting in the education system, which he said will assist Government in making decisions on allocating its scarce resources.
The minister said all teachers must become computer literate in order to do their jobs properly.

"It is going to become a requirement when we establish the Jamaica Teaching Council that part of your professional development is that you are computer literate," he said.

Holness also urged the development of a culture of measurement and evidence-based evaluation, which he said will aid accountability in the system.

EEH project director Dr Jean Beaumont said the JSAS 7.0 will be rolled out all EEH schools in March next year.

She also said that depending on the policy agreed on, parents could log on to find out if their children were actually attending school, or were absent without permission as occurred in a number of cases recently.

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