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by Wes Bowers
The Milpitas Post |
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About a year ago, Mona and Amit Nanda attempted to throw a birthday party for their 6-year-old daughter, who attends Mission San Jose Elementary School. |
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The couple wanted to invite many of their daughter's classmates, but had no way of contacting them because the school is one of many in the district that does not publish a student directory. |
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Although the couple was able to hold the party, Amit Nanda thought communication between parents should be easier. |
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So he contacted a former work colleague, Sandra Murdock, who had given him the idea of creating a parent directory a year earlier. |
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Amit Nanda said by early 2004, Murdock was doing a parent directory as a volunteer, and doing it all by hand. |
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Their new plan was to create a directory on the Internet. |
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"If you do a directory by hand, you need to get consent from other parents to list their information," Amit Nanda said. "I thought: let the parent put whatever information they want to on this site, whenever they want to. They can create a profile and modify it to their liking." |
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By the start of the 2005/2006 school year, Amit Nanda and Murdock had their site, SchoolParentNet.com, online. |
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By the start of the new year, the site had parents participating from 130 schools in 38 states. |
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And Amit Nanda said the number of parents signing up to the site is still growing. |
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The site provides an easier way for parents with children in the same school, grade or even the same classroom to communicate and organize anything from a class party to a parent get-together, he said. |
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Amit Nanda said the business community and colleges and universities have had online directories for years. A similar social network could be applied to parents of school children. |
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"We figured, let's not connect people through their background, or their careers, but through their kids," he said. "If you have kids, your life revolves around them, and their life revolves around school. So let's bring parents together through their kids." |
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Audrey Hess, a Los Gatos parent, said she learned of the site through an e-mail invite. Hess said she is one of five parents at her child's school that are on the Web site, and is hoping more people will sign up. |
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"I can only imagine if a whole school signed up for something like this," she said. "It would make things easier on administration and save a lot of time and paper when a school wanted to send out a newsletter." |
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Hess said she uses the site to organize classroom activities. So far, she said the site is more efficient than using regular e-mail. |
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"Right now, we send out an e-mail to everyone, and everyone replies to everyone and it just becomes a great big mess of e-mails," Hess said. |
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She added the site could also be helpful for parents who have just moved to an area and want to know their new community and school district better. |
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Amit Nanda is hoping his site will benefit schools and their parent-teacher associations as well. |
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He said he hopes to start a program that will generate money from advertisers on the site, and that money will be given directly to a school or school group. |
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He said there is no better use of the Internet than education. |
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"The Internet has been used heavily for a variety of applications, mostly entertainment, and there's nothing wrong with that," he said. "I think what we're trying to do is provide a more practical use for it." |
Mission
