Sponsor
Mike Oppenheim
LAN Coordinator
Manual Arts Senior High School
Mikeo@mahs.org

Description
In many ways Manual Arts High School is a classic inner-city school, with all of the problems and difficulties that the term suggests. Despite its many challenges, the school has a long and distinguished history and is, by some measures, quite successful. It has benefited in many ways from close proximity to USC, most notably as a participant in the Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI), a USC-led enterprise that seeks to prepare students for success in college. USC participated in the development of our Intranet website (http://www.mahs.org) and has provided valuable support in many other ways.

Problem
Many members of the Manual Arts community –teachers, administrators, parents and students- are agreed that one of the key problems we face is a lack of effective college and career counseling. One of the practical upshots of this condition is that few students understand what it takes to graduate and to continue on to study at a higher level. Most of our students lack a clear understanding of where they stand as they move from grade to grade with regard to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s graduation requirements. Few students, and even fewer parents, know how to assess a students’ readiness for college and where students stand with respect to the entrance requirements for community colleges, the UC and Cal State systems and private colleges.

From their periodic ‘report cards,’ students can determine their grade-point-averages and a general notion of the number of credits they have accumulated. However, they have no means of determining how many additional credits they need to graduate, how many they lack and which specific credits they may need to satisfy college entrance requirements.

Our students and, especially, their parents need a secure, user-friendly and always-available system that can be used at home, at local libraries or anywhere the Internet is available to help them understand where students stand vis-à-vis LAUSD graduation requirements, and allow them to realistically assess whether or not they are in the running for admission to specific sets of colleges. To help them in this regard, we would like to develop a Web site which would serve as an extension our existing Intranet Web site. The Web-based service we have in mind would allow students and their parents or guardians to log on in a secure manner to obtain accurate and up-to-date information about an individual student’s progress though high school.

Specifically, we would like to develop a web interface that would make it easy for a parent or student at any grade level in high school to log on and find out precisely how many academic credits a student has earned, how many are currently in progress, and how many the student should have to be on course for graduation.

We would also want to enable the user to discover whether or not a student has passed the CAHSEE (High School Exit Exam) and whether or not she has met certain other graduation requirements, such as the LAUSD’s Technology Literacy and the Community Service requirements.

Further, we would want to enable the user to discover where the student stands, at each grade level, vis-à-vis the specific requirements for admission to the University of California system, the Cal State system, community colleges and representative private colleges, such as USC.

The data required for the program would come from the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Student Information Service. In all likelihood, this data would not be available to us on a ‘live’ ‘real-time’ or interactive basis; rather, we would have to abstract and download it periodically from LAUSD servers. The good news is that the LAUSD already provides custom abstracts or reports which provide most of the information we would need to meet the goals described above.

For ease of maintenance, we would prefer a system based on some flavor of Windows Server, Microsoft SQL and ASP, or a system based on Linux. MySQL and PHP.

Some of the System Requirements, as we currently envisage them, are:

• Secure log-on for parents (and a method, probably involving ‘snail-mail,’ for distributing log-on credentials to them)
• Secure data transmission
• A management module allowing import of student information and class and credit data from files generated by LAUSD Student Information system
• Ideally, a bilingual (Spanish and English) and intuitive user interface