Slashdot Mirror
Bug Means High School Students' Schedule Errors May Last Days
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that thousands of high school students in Prince George's County missed a third day of classes Wednesday, and school officials said it could take more than a week to sort out the chaos caused by a computerized class-scheduling system as students were placed in gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias, libraries and classes they didn't want or need at high schools across the county and their parents' fury over the logistical nightmare rose. 'The school year comes up the same time every year,' said Carolyn Oliver, the mother of a 16-year-old senior who spent Wednesday in the senior lounge at Bowie High School. 'When I heard they didn't have schedules, I was like, "What have they been doing all summer?"' When school opened Monday, about 8,000 high school students had no class schedules and were sent to wait in holding spaces while administrators tried to sort things out." (More below.)
One must know which classes to ditch.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
I remember talking to the admin at one of the colleges I attended. We asked them how they did their scheduling. The rumor was that the Dean would lock himself in a hotel room with a map of the school, the student list, the course catalog, and the teacher list, and 3 bottles of whiskey for a long weekend.
After which, he would take a weeks vacation while everyone marveled over the new schedules.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
High school is a waste of time anyway, and the first week of HS especially so. They weren't going to be learning anything anyway.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I understand that there might be some concern with unleashing all these teenagers on the unsuspecting public, but after all they have been home all summer, so making them stay there for another couple of days while they get all this sorted out doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Nothing good can come of packing a bunch of teenagers into one room with nothing to do (and especially no air conditioning!). At the high school I went to, there would have been at least 2 fights on the first day of such an arrangement, and it would have gone downhill from there.
Oh yeah, and don't most schools have their administrators, and usually the teachers, report in at least a week before school starts? Wouldn't that have been a perfect time to conduct audits and make sure everything was ready for the students to arrive?
Well, let's see.... At the top of the list is not working because they aren't paid over the summer.
This is a particularly annoying version of complaining about inferior service when, in fact, you are the one who funds that service.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
My wife teaches Journalism at a low income high school in Dallas. A few days before school started she was worried about scheduling and so were her coworkers since an online system they're suppose to be using had no schedules in it. Her first day was met with 60 kids in one of her Journalism class, only 5 had orginially signed up. This is a very poor school ripe with gangs which have to be kept apart but with the scheduling farked all the kids were all mixed together. She was in tears on the phone with me worried that if a fight broke out she wouldn't be able to get out of her room since she has to cross the entire class to get from her desk to the door. Her school won't let her carry a concealed weopen, I want her to carry my pistol but I'm afraid if she gets caught with it there would be criminal charges filed.
The second day she submitted about 200 schedule changes to the counselors and had managed to get her class size down to 40. Any known bad kids she just told to leave her class, they just leave school and never come back (the first week or so is the worst then the trouble makers just stop showing up).
Today she showed 1/2 her students a video and tried to teach the other half, I'm guessing she'll do the same tomorrow but switch halves.
As of right now next Monday is declared a "do over first day of school" and the schedules are promised to be fixed. No one believes it though.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
but it's so much more exciting to give them $4mil and pray it works the day it goes live, untested.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
My daughter "selected a sewing class because she is interested in fashion design, but the school selected a basic piano class"
What kind of high school is THIS? We were lucky to have basic computer classes when i was in high school. Sewing and piano? Spoiled bastards.
Send the programmers and administrators to detention!!
I suspect the schools don't run the scheduler until a few days before school actually starts - Teachers can die (happened my senior year), quit, not show up for work, classrooms may be unavailable for many reasons, etc... On top of this, they don't actually know how many students are going to show up until registration closes (typically a week before class starts).
http://xkcd.com/327/ That fuckin' kid. :|
I guess I have this idealistic vision of what should happen here. Conregate the students and ask, "Who's took Algebra last year?" Take the first 20 (okay, 30) student who raise their hand, lead them to math class. "Who's in 9th Grade and hasn't had English yet?" Lead another group away. "Who took chemistry....? Biology...?" I know, it would never be that easy, but I still have some idealistic vision that a group of adults could really teach something; after all, the teachers are just as much victims of this as the students.
Also, keep in mind, this is Prince George's County -- a jurisdiction that in the 1970s capped property taxes at then-existing levels, and allowed only minimal increases since. Combine that with a high population of at-risk students, large pockets of poverty, serious struggles with drugs and crime in the community -- and you have a recipe for disaster. At some level, the people of Prince George's County get the educational system they pay for. And they are cheap, so the fact that they don't have the computer resources that they need is entirely par for the course (sadly).
Both of my kids are in Prince Georges County public schools. They are both in the science and technology magnet program at Eleanor Roosevelt HS. Two years ago, they used mygradebook.com for teachers to use, and it was a breeze to check on grades, see what assignments were due (and what assignments were missing), etc. It was an easy sytem to use, and worked well. Last year ERHS was forced to use the SchoolMax system. It was a disaster. So I'm not surprised that the problem was caused by the SchoolMax software.
Heh, you don't have to tell me. I grew up in Upper Marlboro, and did all my schooling in the PG County School System. Back when I was in middle and high school (in another decade), it was fairly routine for me to have to sort out some kind of heinous scheduling snafu at the beginning of each year. Given that I was out at the edge of the area covered by my high school, bizarre bus schedule errors were almost guaranteed, as well.
The most spectacular goof-up while I was there was the time they refused to close schools one morning, when a blizzard was rolling in. After freezing to death at the bus stop, waiting for our late bus, we had a grueling trip through white-out conditions to the school. The Beltway looked like some kind of post-apocalyptic nuclear survival horror movie, littered with snow-covered jack-knifed tractor trailers and wrecked cars. By the time we finally reached the school building, we were told that school was canceled. However, we could not simply turn around and go home. Oh no. Instead, the bus was obligated to go back to the first school on its evening routes, to pick them up and take them home, first. We were the last school on the evening routes. So, needless to say, the bus didn't even show up to take us home until stupid-o-clock at night, when we should have been going to bed.
And I'm here to tell you, it's downright scary what idiots and idiot programming is foisted on to K-12. While we've never reviewed the SchoolMax software, most of the software I see is "enterprise unaware": EG: no common credential store, little or no real testing, glaring flaws, and most have no concept of interoperability.
My favorite vendor excuse is "It's your network", followed by "No, you can't virtulize this, it has to run on it's own hardware and it can't have other services running." I laugh because our network outperforms most major ISVs (I used to work at one as a second job), and as far as virtulizaion, I've asked venors "why not?" and the answer is never technical, it's always "because we don't support it". 9 times out of ten, the support driods working on something never twig to the fact that their application is running just fine on a virt serv and has been for YEARS. But clue them in, and INSTANTLY the problem is the virtulization, not a bug.
The other thing that makes me laugh is that when you ask how much a license is, it's never "how many CPUs?" or "How many boxes", it's always per student, even if it would only be used by a single classroom, they want to license it for the entire student population.
In over 15 years of working K-12, I can count on one finger the number of vendors that I didn't think were complete idiots, fools, and/or scammers.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
But why are many of the people protesting against government run health insurance on Medicare, and express a high level of satisfaction with it? Same with Medicaid. Same with the US Postal Service (Obama's ignorant quip not withstanding), which I've certainly found easier to deal with than Fedex? Not to even delve into how we (in general) trust the government for security, domestic and abroad, collecting taxes without paying the head of the IRS one out of every ~$700 tax dollars every year (actual number for the CEO of United health care of US health care expenditure)?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a national situation where there's a private company providing a better service than a public equivalent (and this is ignoring the contract asymmetry where Enron is allowed to criminally game the market and the state can't abrogate the contracts, yet the private firm can just say "oops, but our owners have limited liability" and declare bankruptcy.. which abrogates their current contracts). I have a feeling this was different in the 70's and 80s, that government was really a lot less efficient than it is now, or else I doubt Reagan would have had such pull. But I was born just around when Reagen was first elected, and in my adult life the vast majority of the arbitrary, caustic and inefficient bureaucracy that I've encountered has been in the private sector.
While the surest means of preventing excess is a lot of people paying attention to politics, and being vocal... the idea that the current proposals are generating so much vitriol while Bush's Medicare 'reform' that prohibits negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies sure has the appearance of an irrational double standard.
There's pretty strong objection to having government-only health insurance, because it will end up sucking and no one will want to use it.
Nobody (not even Obama or Hillary Clinton) is suggesting government-only healthcare, so I'm not sure what your point is. The healthcare proposals are about a hybrid system.
... and then they built the supercollider.
The program, which he was only able to start using in May, was able to get 77% of the student's schedules in. However, SchoolMax, not being able to work out the remaining 33% of the schedules, removed them completely from the system instead of leaving them incomplete
Don't you hate it when you can't get 110 % of your work done?