SITES LET PARENTS KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON AT SCHOOL

Three years ago, David Leahy, a fourth-grade teacher at the Greenaway Elementary School in Beaverton, Ore., anointed himself the school's Webmaster and started work on his labor of love.

Today, Mr. Leahy spends 90 minutes a week updating the school's site, and parents say his efforts -- particularly the page where he posts his students' work on projects like haiku, proverbs and the Underground Railroad -- have revived dinner table conversations in the homes of his fourth graders all over town.

Parents who visit Mr. Leahy's classroom page say they finally know that their children do a lot more than "nothing" at school every day, and they have the electronic evidence to prove it.

"The Web site gave me a jumping-off point for dialogue with my son about what was going on in his classroom," said Jill Bogle, a Beaverton resident whose son was in Mr. Leahy's class last year.

Now Ms. Bogle's son is in middle school and his teacher does not maintain a Web site, and Ms. Bogle says finding out what is going on at school is a struggle.

Education experts say that the more parents are involved in their children's education, the better the children will perform in school. One of the best ways to foster involvement is to keep communication flowing from school to home.

With 71 percent of the nation's 86,000 schools able to reach the Internet from at least one classroom in each school, according to a report titled "Technology Counts," which was underwritten by the Milken Family Foundation and originally published in Education Week, the Web can be an effective way to send information from school to home, instead of through the backpack express.

At many schools, parents can log on to check homework assignments, peek at their children's latest work and check the results of recent tests.

Parents with enough time, interest and computer access say that the Web sites make them feel more connected to their children's schools, but Barbara Stein, a senior policy analyst for the National Education Association, said the schools' Web site efforts were usually done on a small scale by volunteers and tended to lack a larger strategic plan.

Eighty percent of teachers are not comfortable using computer technology, Ms. Stein said, according to a survey on professional development and training conducted by the United States Department of Education in 1998 and distributed last year. And she said that few teachers had time to keep a Web site current.

As a result, communication can be spotty, and parents who come to rely on the Web may be abruptly cut adrift, like Ms. Bogle, if a student moves into a new class that doesn't have a Web page.

A number of companies are making it easier for schools and teachers to set up a Web site. Companies with a well established Web presence include MySchoolOnline.com (familyeducation.com/golocal), part of the Family Education Network; School Notes (www.edgate.com/notes.html), part of the Copernicus Education Gateway; High Wired.com (www.highwired.com), an online publishing service for high schools; Electric SchoolHouse (www.eschoolhouse.com); and bigchalk.com (www.bigchalk.com). And the publishing powerhouse Scholastic (www.scholastic.com) is retooling the teacher-to-parent portion of its Web site.

The point of entry for many school Web sites is often a template that includes things like lunch menus, sports schedules, teacher rosters and notes from the principal.

Although business models vary, these sites make money through advertising, which can include a company's logo on the site, banner advertising and underwriting. Most links are to sites offering services like online tutoring, research tools and encyclopedias. Some sites, like Scholastic's, offer products for sale, but sales pitches are made on only the section of the site aimed at parents.

In addition to tools that a school can use to build a Web site, these education-based companies offer electronic services like teacher training and curriculum building. They also offer sites where parents can discover how and what their children are learning or what children need to know to pass state achievement or proficiency tests. There are also links to online reference sources and educational products.

Even though thousands of schools have signed up for Web services -- HighWired, for example, said it had signed up about 8,000 of the nation's 20,000 high schools -- few schools are using them. An impressive roster of schools is registered for each service, but a quick check of school Web pages revealed that most are blank.

"The pretty consistent error that companies make and educators make is they underestimate the degree to which it's labor intensive to put up and maintain the information on a Web site even if the site sits somewhere else," said Peter Grunwald, the president of Grunwald Associates of San Mateo, Calif., a market research and consulting firm that focuses on the technology link between home and school.

Jon Carson, the chief executive of the Family Education Network, said: "The local stuff takes time. There's a three- to four-month lag between sign-up and training." Some 9,000 schools have registered for the company's template-based service, but Mr. Carson acknowledges that actual use has been slow.

Teachers may be reluctant to get class Web sites up and running for a number of reasons: teachers are often pressed for time, some suffer from technophobia and others suspect that giving parents so much access may not have positive results, say educators and experts who are studying school technology issues.

"It's not clear to the educators what the benefit of it is," Mr. Carson said. "They're getting pulled into it. We now know that if we get two or more teachers that get excited about the whole notion of building a classroom Web site, it starts to spread in the school. The first wave is happening now, and it's been with the lunch menu."

Mr. Carson said parents who rely on the Internet for the mundane aspects of school-to-home communication were primed to open other windows that school Web sites can provide.

Patti O'Neal, the office clerk at the Bright Star Elementary School in Douglasville, Ga., said that her main job was operating the photocopier and supervising the school's Opportunity Room, a newfangled name for a detention room. Ms. O'Neal said she used her free time to maintain the school's extensive Web site, including typing in the daily homework assignments.

Teachers say feedback from parents has been overwhelmingly positive, and Ms. O'Neal said the phone calls and e-mail messages that take her to task for typos -- the school was flooded with questions and complaints after she typed teriyaki beer instead of teriyaki beef on the lunch menu -- proved that parents were paying attention.

"The lunch menus and sports schedules are going to be an important hook," said Mr. Grunwald, who noted that parents who found blank sites or out-of-date sites would visit them only a few times before writing them off as a waste of time. "The challenge for educators and companies is creating a vibrant community around the information," he added.

For now, though, Dorothy Dike, a mother of a fifth grader in Suzanne Marcus's class at the Cardinal Forest Elementary School in Springfield, Va., appreciates the nightly homework posting at Copernicus's free SchoolNotes.com site.

Mrs. Dike checks her daughter's homework assignments nightly before heading home from work. Her daughter used to say little about school, Mrs. Dike said, but she is now more than happy to volunteer information about her day at school because she knows her mother is paying attention.

For more information, visit the SchoolNotes.com website at http://www.schoolnotes.com