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Dear Parents and Guardians:
Starting in the 2018-2019
school year, Westfield HS will no longer purchase student agendas for students or faculty
members. Instead we will provide students with a downloadable customized
phone app called the Westfield App. The purchase and distribution of
student agendas is a practice many schools adopted in an effort to help
students manage assignments, provide general information about schools and
school policies, and serve as a place for teachers to record student’s hall passes.
We have found that the majority of our students misplace their agendas before
the end of the school year. At a cost of over $6000 per year, this has
proven to be a wasteful use of school funds.
If as planned each FCPS high
school student receives a laptop computer in the 2019-2020 school year, then
the Westfield App will be the perfect complement for information management, school policies and practices, and communication for
our students. In the first year, we will save over $3000 in comparison to
purchasing paper student agendas, and over three years we will save over
$11,000.
The Westfield App will be
customized with information about our school and community and will be
accessible to students, faculty and staff, and parents on their computers and/or
their smartphones. The Westfield App offers the following features:
- Push
Notifications – an additional means of sending announcements to users
- Calendars
– users can link calendar events on the Westfield App with their personal
calendar
- Quick
Links – Westfield home page, Activities home page, etc.
- Social
Media Feeds – access to our Twitter accounts
- My
Assignments – users may use this as a digital planner to keep track of their assignments
- Language
Translations – linked to Google Translate to assist our English Language
Learners
- Secured
Access (Student Login Credentials) – provides protection of student information
- Teacher
Contacts – FCPS contact information for our staff members
For those students who may
not have a smartphone or access to a computer, we will provide them with paper
copies of the information in the Westfield App.
Students are not required to
upload the Westfield App. For those
students who either choose not to use the Westfield App or do not have a
smartphone or computer, we are working with Westfield Live (student daily news
on YouTube), and other groups in our school to ensure information in posted around
the school and announced as well as shared electronically. We will also provide paper copies of selected
information in the Westfield App to those students who do not have a SMART
phone or computer.
We will provide our students and you with
specifics on uploading the Westfield App in August.
Sincerely,
Anthony E. Copeland, PhD
Principal
Twitter: @westfield_hs
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