MANDEVILLE, Manchester — Long before the Ministry of Education rolled out its online platform during the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford Davis, principal of May Day High, was already embracing the digitisation of his school.

The school leader has taken it a step further by encouraging the parents of his 1,040 young charges to get online through an app with keeping abreast of their children’s academic performance and attendance.

“The performance part has been there for quite a number of years. The same software, as it evolves, the developers add things to it, so right now it has the capability for attendance to scan the QR code on the students’ ID,” he said last Thursday.

“All parents should download the My School Jamaica app. We don’t give them the paper report, so they have to go on it to get the report,” he explained.

The move has been commended by Education Minister Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon who toured the school last Thursday.

“There are wonderful things happening in our schools across Jamaica and this is just one example of a principal who proudly told me [that his] entire school is on [his] phone and he has worked really hard and these are the kinds of stories that we have to tell Jamaica about,” she said.

“Because of principals, our teachers are doing fantastic things in many of our schools and it needs to be told,” she added.

Davis told the minister that the school has been embracing digitisation for the past five years.

“We got it [online platform] ourselves before the ministry [of education] got theirs…we were way ahead. All our students had their e-mails, we had our school management system, our Google Classroom,” he said.

“During COVID some teachers who were afraid of touching the technology, I saw them teaching and I was so pleased. We moved from there into where we have My School Jamaica. We had it for a long time,” he explained.

He said the school’s student management system has information and data on every child.

“You can get your transcript the same day, once you [attended] school from 2013…We are planning to scan those [from before 2013] and get those up on one system,” he said.

“We are very mindful of the Data Protection Act, so all of that was taken into consideration,” added Davis.

For students who are late in attendance, Davis is now phasing in another aspect of the software to alert parents.

“We can track the performance of each child. We can track their class. We can track the enrolment, the attendance. Right now what we do is the teachers can mark the register from their phones or tablets, what we do is the students who are late, we have a tablet at the gate that we use. Presently, we mark the names of those students and at the end of the day I can print a list of the names,” he said.

“The parent can log onto the child’s report and access it right there from anywhere,” he added while pointing to the efficiency of the system.

He is optimistic that the challenge of reliable Internet access will be addressed through the use of Starlink.

“We have always had a challenge with Internet and our students, based on where they are from, they don’t have data. The good news is that Starlink is coming, and even though the Ministry of Education has given us Internet, we would love to have Starlink,” he said.

“We want all of our students to be able to access that information. We want all of us to love technology. There are many people who are afraid of it, but it is going to be at your own peril if you are afraid of it. We have to get with it,” added Davis.

Another phase that Davis is now working on is to digitise aspects of the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH) at his school.

“What we will be doing next year is that the students who are on PATH will get one ticket and just like a credit card, they swipe and get their lunch. All of the background work has been done,” he said while adding that he has been across the island training teachers to use the software.

Meanwhile, Morris Dixon lauded Davis for his push for digitisation.

“May Day is doing a lot of fantastic things with the technology — you see the laptops that the students have, you see the beautiful smartboard that is here, but even more than that, the principal of May Day is one of the most tech-savvy principals that we have in our education system,” she said.