Dear Dr. Iannelli and Superintendent Lindsey,

We write to you today as the teachers of John Bowne High School out of intense concern about the extraordinary amount of work we are doing to transcribe assignments and grades from Google Classroom to Skedula. The Department of Education urged schools to migrate to the DOE central domain and by doing so we lost the integration feature between Google Classroom and Skedula that most other schools using their G-suite accounts continue to have. The absence of this feature creates duplicative work that requires many unnecessary hours of transcribing not only of grades but also of assignments. The DOE and John Bowne High School chose Google classroom as the method for delivering instruction virtually and that platform allows teachers to create an assignment, assign it to students, allows students to submit the assignment which teachers can then view, grade and provide feedback for. Without the integration feature teachers now have to create an assignment in Skedula which was already created in gc and then transfer grades from google classroom to Skedula. Many teachers are doing this by hand, with 2 devices, or downloading templates for each assignment creating doubles of csv sheets for each assignment in order to transcribe these grades.

We had hoped for this issue to be resolved by Skedula/Google/DOE in the first few weeks of the fall, but as the months go by it has become clear to us that the issue may not have a resolution and in the meantime, we are at a breaking point. We can no longer continue to do this extra work. The amount of time and energy it takes to create assignments, assign them and review them virtually is significant in comparison to teaching in person, adding on the additional work of transferring grades to another platform feels inhumane especially when we cannot see the benefit it has to our students.

Our teaching staff has always gone above and beyond for our students. We will continue to do the difficult work that is required of us during this extraordinary time, but we implore you to trust us to do our jobs without any unnecessary burdens. Parents, administrators and counselors can be provided information about students in a variety of ways and we are willing to do that as we always have. Teachers should have the ability to choose the gradebook platform that works best for their classes and students while fulfilling their professional duties of keeping accurate grades, communicating with parents and guidance when students are failing or struggling and uploading grades to STARS. We implore you to resolve this issue so that we can continue working with our students in the best way possible without the added stress of transcribing assignments and grades for the convenience of administration.

Sincerely,

Teachers of John Bowne High School