Parent Teacher Conference Scheduling Software - Is it really needed?

For my first real post, I'm taking a look at an interesting industry. Parent Teacher Conference scheduling software. With over 130,000 schools in the USA, it's a huge market for companies that can provide an elegant solution for the time-consuming and complicated scheduling process.


The question really is whether scheduling is such a big pain that schools really need to make the investment to improve the system. To get a better idea we'll take a look at the 3 groups that are directly affected by the Parent-Teacher Conference scheduling process.


The first group is the administration of the school. Bear in mind that these folks (including the secretaries and principal) are tasked with keeping the school running smoothly on a daily basis and already have their hands full dealing with teachers, students and myriad other tasks.

Along comes the conference and the administration now needs to send out scheduling forms to the parents. Then they need to deal with phone calls from parents requesting different time slots, etc. They even need to make follow-up calls to remind some parents to send the forms in (only to find out that the parent never got the form in the first place...so the school needs to re-send it).

Finally after all the forms are back, the administration needs to work out a master schedule and iron out all the kinks (conflicting meeting times, etc). This last detail actually is a complete nightmare. Often many slots will be "oversubscribed" by multiple parents and the admin will need to call them all to work out new times. Things are already pretty grim.


The next group is the teachers. Often they are drawn into the fray and need to work overtime (which for some schools can be quite costly). The teachers themselves can get quite frustrated with difficult parents which of course is counter-productive when building an educational partnership (obviously there needs to be mega-cooperation between teachers and parents for kids to get the best education).


The last group is the parents. They are often coping with insane itineraries (work, shopping, gym, shrink, more work, etc.). Imagine you have two kids in one school.......and you end up meeting 6 teachers (each for 10 minutes only) over the course of 4 hours. What a disaster. You could have been done in under an hour, but with lack of visibility and coordination, your 6 meeting, instead of being back-to-back (or at least closer together), were scattered throughout the evening!@#$. As a result, instead of having a nice, pleasant meeting with the teacher, the parent is all ticked off and not quite in the mood to work with the teacher. Additionally, parents begin to wonder if their kids are getting a decent education when the school they send to is operating like they are still in the ice-age.


Of course schools can try and employ the age-old method of placing a pencil and sign-up sheet on the classroom door and leave it to the parents to create the schedule. But this option is not ideal and can create a big waste of time as well as some “friction” between parents. Imagine you get stuck in traffic and get to the sign-up sheet too late. Now you are stuck with the last appointment and have to wait hours for your turn. Or how about some parents waiting impatiently in the school hallway waiting for their turn to meet the teacher. Some guy shows up and claims to be before them or something like that. Things could get ugly real fast. This is especially true if parents have more than one child in the school.


In short, it's clear that Parent-Teacher Conference scheduling is currently very inefficient.... leaving just about everyone involved stressed out, overworked, and often with an inconvenient schedule.


Wouldn't it be great if this whole issue would only be taught in History class.....well, fortunately due to a handful of software companies, it will be soon.


In my next post I'll describe some of the companies and their solutions in greater detail, but for now, here is a list of the ones I've found:

PT Conference Maker

PTC Wizard

Canyon Creek Software


For now, check these out on your own and next time we'll take a look at them together.