North Park Secondary School has time-travelled back to the 1900s. Due to issues with the new attendance system, from September 25th to October 4th, all teachers were forced to do attendance on paper and ask fellow students to bring it down to the office.
The new paper system presented several problems for teachers, such as when a student was late, teachers would have to request attendance back from the office to change the student’s status from absent to late. By contrast, students enjoyed the new attendance system, as it offered them an opportunity to take a break from class and roam around the school for a bit.
Ms. Fiocco kindly let us interview her and explain her thoughts about this situation. When the issues with the attendance system first started, Ms. Fiocco knew that it would only last about a week or two before the online attendance was back. She believes there could have been better ways to deal with the attendance problem such as sharing a Google spreadsheet with all North Park teachers. However, that method would have also taken a long time to set up and would have been a struggle for the office staff to keep up with. Even though we wasted plenty of sheets of paper, paper attendance was the best and most efficient method of all, in terms of time.
The paper attendance era was not long ago, but it definitely should not come back. Just two weeks of paper attendance were enough to cause lots of chaos. No one wants to go back to the 1900s!
THE NORTH STAR 