GoGuardian: asking for parent support to advocate to the BOE
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
|
I am a middle school math teacher with 28 years of teaching experience in MCPS, and also the parent of an MCPS student. In recent weeks, my fellow MCEA representatives at Takoma Park Middle School and I have had many conversations with teachers in our building who are frustrated and concerned about the decision to cancel GoGuardian for the 2024-25 school year.
In case you are not familiar with GoGuardian, it is a tool that thousands of MCPS teachers use regularly to monitor students while they complete learning tasks and take assessments on Chromebooks. GoGuardian helps students stay on-task and avoid the temptations of gaming and other online distractions. It promotes academic integrity during assessments. Many teachers also use GoGuardian as a communication tool, to ask and answer questions during learning tasks on Chromebooks, and also to check in with students about their emotional well-being. So far, the only rationale presented for eliminating GoGuardian is to save $233,925, which represents 0.007% of the proposed MCPS operating budget of 3.164 billion dollars. Concerned that teachers’ voices had not been considered in the decision to eliminate GoGuardian, I first created a survey to capture staff opinions at Takoma Park Middle School. The results of that survey were so compelling, I decided to take the survey county-wide. Data is still coming in, but I wanted to share some preliminary results, based on over 700 responses (and counting) from MCPS educators. 83% of teachers who responded to the survey use GoGuardian all or most of the time that students are on Chromebooks. 88% strongly agreed (and another 9% agreed) with the statement “If my students use Chromebooks without GoGuardian, they are more likely to spend instructional time playing video games and accessing other non-school related websites.” 88% strongly agreed (and another 9% agreed) with the statement “If my students use Chromebooks without GoGuardian, I will have to spend more time monitoring Chromebook usage to keep them on-task, and will be less able to help with learning tasks and provide feedback on their work.” Even more compelling than the numbers are the hundreds of comments from educators who are extremely concerned about the negative impacts of eliminating GoGuardian on student learning and student well-being. This Wednesday night, the survey will close and I will be sharing the full data with the Board of Education and Stephanie Sheron, Chief of MCPS’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, who announced the decision to cancel GoGuardian. However, with the Board scheduled to meet this Thursday (February 22) to vote on a tentative budget, it seemed important to get the word out to parents as quickly as possible. I believe that a budget savings of 0.007% should not outweigh the voices of thousands of MCPS educators who rely on GoGuardian to encourage the responsible use of technology, help students focus on learning, and safeguard the emotional well-being of their students. If you believe that MCPS should listen to these voices, please contact the decision makers and urge that full funding for GoGuardian be restored in the 2024-25 MCPS budget. Email addresses for Ms. Sheron and the board members are available at the MCPS website. Thank you for your time and support of our MCPS students and teachers. Sincerely, Sarah Manchester Math Teacher, MCEA Representative, and MCPS Parent Takoma Park Middle School |
Anonymous
|
Thank you for going to this effort on behalf of an important tool that is critical to student success.
I don't know that I believed the metrics provided by the school district saying teachers didn't use GoGuardian much. Admin lies to the BOE. |
Anonymous
|
As a math teacher, I suspect, or at least hope, you took some statistics classes in college. And if so, I imagine one of those classes at least touched on the topic of sampling bias. I'm sure you see where I'm going with this.
Why should anyone look at your survey results in light of MCPS's district-wide usage data? Don't get me wrong- I don't see how you could have Chromebooks in class without something like GoGuardian, but clearly many, many teachers were doing just that. Or you're going to want to address that discrepancy with the Board when describing your survey responses. |
Anonymous
They do, and they've demonstrated that they're perfectly willing to lie to the BoE. But they don't want to get caught in a lie. Lying about usage figures is dangerous in that respect. There's a clear, quantitative answer, recorded in a third-party system. Sure, they can make up data when they present to the BoE, but they better hope that no one on the inside leaks the real figures. This would be a strange thing to lie about. |
Anonymous
Not the OP. The county data at high altitude suggests that usage is probably partly school-dependent (meaning that some individual schools are heavy users compared to others) and also partly level-related (more frequently used with older students). Neither of those points is especially surprising. Do you really need GoGuardian to watch the computer behaviors of first graders, for example? But if I taught middle school, I would sure as heck want it. There is admittedly going to be inherent bias in the survey because of who is going to speak up in favor of the resource, but if the survey results can be broken down by grade level usage, it might help the case that the OP and others are making. |
Anonymous
|
I can't believe that MCPS is planning to eliminate this important software when it wastes so much money on other things. I will definitely write in.
In addition to the BOE members, is there anyone in Central Office we should be contacting? Here are the BOE email addresses so people can copy and past them: Karla_Silvestre@mcpsmd.org, Lynne_Harris@mcpsmd.org, Brenda_Wolff@mcpsmd.org, Graciela_Rivera-oven@mcpsmd.org, Shebra_L_Evans@mcpsmd.org, Julie_Yang@mcpsmd.org, Rebecca_K_Smondrowski@mcpsmd.org, Sami_N_Saeed@mcpsmd.org |
Anonymous
I agree. OP, I think your cause is worthy and you're right to fight for it, but you're gonna have to take on those usage metrics presented at the board head on. |
Anonymous
| I wonder if the cost would be less if it was only purchased for middle/high schools. Having 2 high schoolers at home makes me know how much time is wasted on their Chromebooks and I feel GoGuardian is definitely needed. That said, I am a 2nd grade teacher and I rarely use it. Occasionally, I’ll turn it on for a quick peak, but truthfully we don’t really use the Chromebooks much and elementary school classes probably skew the data. |
Anonymous
Agree. You’re going to need to address the usage data and ask for metrics broken down by grade and potentially across school. Especially when other teachers have already publicly admitted to not using the tool. Software licensing agreements are expensive. Further while this seems a small part of the budget, the largest part is salary and benefits. A cost that is increasing as new schools and grades come online. So unless you want them to make all the cuts from the largest part of the budget, they must be made somewhere. |
Anonymous
|
That we're even talking about this is a reflection of how screwed up MCPS administration and the BoE are. I tend to think it would be a mistake to drop GoGuardian without replacing it with a similar tool. But I also don't think this is something that the BoE should be micromanaging. This perpetuates the untenable situation we have where the BoE positions are too time intensive to allow qualified individuals with kids and jobs to hold them. So we end up with duds that aren't capable of overseeing the superintendent and holding her accountable. So we end up with duds in the central office.
We need a better board that can bring in better administrators that can make better decisions. |
Anonymous
Write them individually. They are more likely to view their individual emails quickly, versus ones sent to the generic BoE email address. |
Anonymous
In a perfect world, MCPS would have good admin leaders. That isn't where wea] are at, and this is an important issue for secondary school . Parents and teachers need to write the board. |
Anonymous
Why is the politically-focused Board better equipped, in an election year, to make a sensible, data-driven decision than career professionals? The BoE is quite possibly the only group that makes MCPS central admin look relatively good in comparison. |
Anonymous
|
English teachers out here need it desperately too…..
We were told that we shouldn’t worry because the county will invest in “trainings to help teachers monitor technology without technology.” I wish I was joking….investments in us spending most of our class time staring at kids screens??? It’s the shit like this (compounded with being forced to pass illiterate teenagers) that makes me demoralized and want to quit….like there wasn’t any teacher survey about how we use GoGuardian before they decided to nix it. They just didn’t think enough teachers were using it (again,they didn’t actually talk to teachers). MCPS spends SO MUCH— WAY too much in my opinion —on central office bloat (McKnight superintendent just got to create cushy new superfluous positions for corrupt friends) RJ, way too many communications staff + crisis PR team +legal for getting sued over the culture of bullying etc teachers deal with…money on the stupid photo ops and comms messages from The superintendent to staff telling them to “remember their why” and that MCPS is “stronger” than recent media portrayals…(that’s a lie) Why couldn’t they listen to the boots on the ground? The actual teachers in the classrooms? About what they need? Everyone at my large school is upset about GoGuardian being taken away. Looking at how much corruption was in central office and all those friends of McKnight and Brian Hull getting 250k salaries….. Like really? We can’t afford GoGuardian? We can’t talk to the actual teachers? I know not everyone uses it, but, A LOT of teachers still do and it is invaluable. Especially when it comes to attempting to stop plagiarizing and blatant copying. If I didn’t care about my kids, I would just honestly give up. |
Anonymous
A LOT is relative. For example someone might think 2000 teachers using go guardian is a lot. But evaluating that to a license contract for say 10,000 staff, that is only 20% usage. This is why people are saying you’re going to need to back up your feelings or anecdotal data with actual evidence against usage data. |