Saanich School District

Challenge

Tackling the “Backpack Express”

School District 63 Saanich (Saanich Schools) works to inspire its K-12 students in the Saanich Peninsula, British Columbia, to reach their potential and become responsible citizens. With eight elementary schools, three middle schools, three secondary schools, an online learning South Island Distance Education School (SIDES) and other alternative learning programs, Saanich Schools serves around 8,000 students.

In the Canadian province of British Columbia, teachers are required to report student progress to parents and guardians at least five times per school year. Progress is shared with formal written learning updates and summary of learning cards and more informally with conferences, discussions, emails and portfolio entries. For years, Saanich Schools had relied on a lot of manual work to provide parents and guardians with the more formal reports: teachers spent hours preparing them, administrators spent hours checking them, and clerical staff spent hours printing, sorting and stapling. Then, all those reports needed to be distributed for hand delivery.

“In the end, all of this work relied on what we call the ‘backpack express’ to be delivered to parents,” says Sean Hayes, principal of SIDES at Saanich Schools. “If a student was absent on the day, or simply didn’t want their parents to see their report card, the report likely did not make it home.”

The district estimates that over 50% of the report cards were never picked up by students, and especially at the high school level, hundreds of reports were regularly shredded. Emailing the formal reports was not an option due to the privacy concerns associated with unsecured email systems. The informal reports faced similar challenges in reaching parents and guardians. Parent-teacher conferences had a limited number of available appointments, while phone calls and emails were difficult to track.

“If or when reports did make it home, parents were often surprised that they hadn’t had an update sooner, and frequently requested more visibility into their child’s learning,” continues Hayes. “It was a system that frustrated school staff, students and parents alike, and was in desperate need of an overhaul.”

Solution

Drawing on Brightspace Expertise

In 2023, the British Columbia Ministry of Education and Child Care designated SIDES as one of British Columbia’s official Provincial Online Learning Schools (POLS) and named D2L Brightspace as the official learning management system (LMS) for all POLS in the province. SIDES was one of D2L’s first K12 customers and Saanich Schools saw the government endorsement of the LMS as an opportunity to extend its use of the platform beyond SIDES.

“Seeing the success of Brightspace at SIDES opened the door to the possibility of securing Brightspace accounts for all students and using it as a place where students and families could access report cards and other important documents,” confirms Cody Henschel, director of information technology.

Leveraging the Brightspace expertise of its IT department, Saanich Schools developed a Python application that utilizes Brightspace APIs to create and maintain personal Reporting Courses for all students. The application also links the Brightspace Parent and Guardian tool to the courses and pulls in data from the provincial student information system, MyEducation BC.

“When reporting time comes around, our IT team uploads PDFs of Learning Updates, Summary of Learning cards and any other documentation into the Reporting Courses,” explains Gordon Celesta, programmer analyst and systems administrator. “The documents can then be securely accessed by both students and their parents or guardians from this central repository.”

Supporting a Smooth Transition

Before launching the new Reporting Courses to the entire student population, Saanich Schools decided to run a pilot project. Initially, only parents and guardians of high school students were encouraged to create their Brightspace accounts, and access to Brightspace was enabled alongside the traditional paper reports delivered by the backpack express. After gathering feedback from both families and school staff, the district phased out all other methods of delivering reports in favor of Brightspace—first in high schools, and now in middle and elementary schools, too.

“The feedback on the trial run was overwhelmingly positive, which encouraged us to roll out Reporting Courses across the board as soon as possible,” notes Henschel.

Result

Driving Parent and Guardian Insight

Now, more than 14,000 of Saanich Schools’ students and 1,500 parents or guardians have accessed Reporting Courses through Brightspace. In anticipation of completing the platform rollout across its middle and elementary schools, the district has created an additional 15,575 Reporting Courses, with more to follow soon. So far, the staff have uploaded 35,928 Learning Updates, 13,655 student schedules, and 10,343 graduation status updates, for a total of almost 60,000 important documents safely delivered to homes.

“We expect that by the end of the 2024/2025 school year, the vast majority of the Brightspace parent and guardian accounts will be activated, with families getting timely and secure access to student progress on a scale never before seen in Saanich Schools,” says Celesta.

Significantly, as all reports are stored together and are no longer at risk of being lost, families can look back at previous reports to track student progress from term to term. Additionally, by including other important documentation such as course level progress, course activity feeds and calendars in Reporting Courses, the district provides deeper insight into each student’s learning. To further encourage parents and guardians to actively use Brightspace, Saanich Schools is working to create more meaningful reasons to visit and engage with the platform. One such initiative currently in development is a process to integrate student attendance data directly into Brightspace, giving parents and guardians access to this important information.

“Our students are already reporting that trips for ice cream are on the up as parents are now actually seeing the Learning Updates each term,” adds Hayes.

Cutting the Administrative Burden

School staff across the district are also seeing the benefits of Reporting Courses in Brightspace.

“Clerical teams in our high school offices in particular are reporting that Learning Update season is no longer a mad scramble of printing, stapling, sorting and shredding,” says Hayes. “Additionally, as parents have immediate and reliable access to information, the number of phone calls to the office has gone down. Our valuable team members are now free to pursue other important work that is always needing attention in a busy school office.”

Teachers similarly report a reduction in inquiries from parents, empowering them to focus on teaching and learning instead of administrative tasks.

In parallel, by eliminating paper reports, Saanich Schools is using Brightspace to drive better environmental practices, in line with its vision of public education as contributing to a healthy, responsible and environmentally sustainable society.

“Imagine that—a digital report card doing exactly what report cards are actually intended to do, all without harming trees or wasting staples,” concludes Henschel. “We are excited to keep growing this initiative and empowering more meaningful conversations at home, to ultimately help our students reach their highest potential.”