An Important Message from Mr. Goings, Principal, to All New Parent Portal Users

Welcome to the Parent Portal! We are confident you will find the portal to be a great way to keep up with your student’s busy life at Highlands Ranch High School. We take great pride in being one of the first schools in the Douglas County School District to make the portal available to parents. On your first “visit”to the portal, please take some time to familiarize yourself with the valuable information found under Calendar, Registration, Schedule, Attendance, Fees, and Reports.

One of the most popular features on your portal will be the teachers’ gradebooks, which allows you to follow the progress of your student in all of his/her classes. We give our teachers considerable autonomy as to how they set up their gradebooks, so each is unique. The only requirement we place on teachers is that gradebooks be updated at least every two weeks. This insures that you are seeing the most recent grade calculation. Most of our teachers update much more frequently than every two weeks.

Gradebooks are located under Schedule, on the left side of your portal page. When you click on Schedule, your student’s schedule will appear and the “A+” icon will take you to that teacher’s gradebook. If you have a question about an assignment or grade that you see in a gradebook, please talk with your student first. More often than not, your student will be able to explain the reason for what you are seeing in the gradebook. If your student is not able to satisfactorily answer your questions, the next step is to encourage your student to speak with the teacher. This is a student advocacy process that we feel is critical for our students to learn and practice. You should have another conversation with your student following his/her discussion with the teacher. At that point, if you still have a question or concern, you should contact the teacher yourself for clarification. We want our teachers using their time to design and deliver great lessons in the classroom; if they are getting barraged with phone calls and emails from parents, they will not be able to do their great job teaching.

Another great feature on the portal is Attendance. You will be able to see your student’s attendance on any given day at any time. Our teachers are expected to take attendance approximately ten minutes after the tardy bell. Therefore, if you see a tardy, you know your student arrived to class after the tardy bell but before ten minutes of class had gone by. If you see a red “A” (for absence) you know your student either arrived to class more than ten minutes late, or did not arrive at all, and you did not excuse that absence. (This is called “ditching” in kid lingo.) A yellow “A” means the absence is in a holding pattern of 48 hours. In other words, we are waiting to hear from you to determine the legitimacy of that absence (for example, the absence was due to a dentist appointment). After 48 hours, a yellow “A” either becomes a red “A”, which indicates he/she ditched that class, or a black “A” which means he/she was absent but you have called the Attendance Office within the allotted 48 hours to excuse that absence. Having this information, especially in cases where a student’s attendance is negatively affecting his/her grade, can help parents have the needed conversations with their student in order to improve attendance.

We hope you will find the portal to be a great communication tool, and we hope you will visit it often!