long-term sub and a Gradebook mess

[Anonymous]

One of my kid's MS teachers took emergency leave for at least 1 month, and there's a LT sub assigned to cover until the teacher returns. But all of a sudden my kid's Gradebook has become a mess. Assignments are being marked missing with 0% assigned when the due date in the system is marked as days later, and my kid has emailed the sub to ask why the zero was assigned with no response. In other cases, I am getting Canvas email notifications that grades have been inputted, but the grades themselves aren't updating in Gradebook.

Teacher will be out at least until the new year, but perhaps longer. I guess there's still time until the marking period ends for the regular teacher to clean up all these issues. But is it better not to wait and have my kid flag these issues to someone else (guidance counselor)? It seems like the sub may not know how to manage the various MCPS systems.

[Anonymous]

Yes, I am sure it is a mess. It takes a long time for a sub to get access to Synergy in order to enter grades. I think that they have to wait the number of days to go from a short-term sub to a long-term sub, then the process can start. Which then can still take awhile.

Canvas and Synergy are two separate platforms. Not everything assigned in Canvas turns into a grade in Synergy. You may get notifications from Canvas about an assignment, which has nothing to do with Synergy. Teachers have to manually sync grades from Canvas to Synergy. But, the sub can't do that until they get the right permissions. And it is not the easiest thing in the world and takes awhile to get the hang of things. Canvas and Synergy both think that they know what we want them to do and end up doing things we don't like. I would import a quiz from last year and students and parents would get a notification that the quiz was scored and they received a zero on it, because Canvas put in the same due date from last year. There are so many layers that sometimes things get mixed up.

I would wait it out a little bit and see how things pan out. Interims are coming out, so the sub and content specialist will be working on getting the grade book up to par.

[Anonymous]

It happened to my hs kid in two classes. In one class, she had an excused assignment that ended up as listed as missing, which changed her quarter grade from an A to a B. She was totally on the bubble grade-wise but she shouldn't have to receive a B for an administrative error. It took several emails from me (after she tried to advocate for herself) to get it changed.

[Anonymous]

It's a tough one. If you write the school to advocate your child now, they may think you should have waited to see if the situation is corrected, because...long term sub-what do you expect?

And if you wait to see if it's resolved, the school may tell you that you/your child should have contacted them about the errors immediately and now it's too late because Gradebook locked or whatever...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's a tough one. If you write the school to advocate your child now, they may think you should have waited to see if the situation is corrected, because...long term sub-what do you expect?

And if you wait to see if it's resolved, the school may tell you that you/your child should have contacted them about the errors immediately and now it's too late because Gradebook locked or whatever...

+1

I agree, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. So I'd lean more on being damned if you do and reach out to the school about your concerns.

[Anonymous]

Canvas is probably set to auto-sync and the LTS can’t use synergy yet. Happens all the time at my school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It happened to my hs kid in two classes. In one class, she had an excused assignment that ended up as listed as missing, which changed her quarter grade from an A to a B. She was totally on the bubble grade-wise but she shouldn't have to receive a B for an administrative error. It took several emails from me (after she tried to advocate for herself) to get it changed.

Not the same situation at all.