The No-Excuses Hotline for Homework

Forget about skipping that “Tom Sawyer” essay. Or blanking out on tomorrow’s spelling quiz. Or pretending no long-division assignment is due.

It won’t work--not at Colina Middle School, anyway.

A homework hotline at the Thousand Oaks school tells parents what their children should be doing, alerts them when report cards are handed out and keeps them updated on school events.

“This is the answer to parents pulling their hair out trying to get the straight story” about homework assignments, said veteran school counselor Sam Kane, creator of Colina’s Homework and Communication Hotline.

It’s not a new idea--in fact, Kane was inspired by similar hotlines at other schools around the state.

Many homework hotlines aim to provide help to students struggling with a knotty problem at home. The Los Angeles Unified School District and KLCS-TV Channel 58, for example, offer a toll-free number (800 LA STUDY) staffed by teachers who help students with English, math and other homework questions.

Others, like Kane’s project, address the more fundamental mission of ensuring that students--and parents--know what the homework assignment is to begin with.

*

Among others that have taken this approach over the last decade are schools in Laguna Beach, Ojai and Irvine.

The Nashville company that owns a trademark on the term “homework hotline,” Advanced Voice Technologies, has installed about 700 such systems around the country over the last 10 years, company spokesman Herb Nachman said.

For Kane, the advantage of such a hotline is that it gives parents the power to participate.

“When the kids say, ‘I mean it, mom, I don’t have any homework,’ parents now have a magical number to really find out what the homework is and compare what their child has done with the assignment read over the phone,” Kane said.

Though the hotline at Colina is 3 years old, this is the first year large numbers of parents are using it, Kane said. They often discover it at parent-teacher conferences, where they are told their children are forgetting to do work that often is found days later crumpled at the bottom of their backpacks.

All of the school’s 850 students may call the hotline to check updated homework assignments by punching in a teacher’s individual four-digit code.

About 150 families have gone a step further by signing up for what the school calls a “guided study” program. Participating parents are guaranteed to receive automated calls at home alerting them that their child missed an assignment and will be staying after school to complete it.

Parents who are not signed up for guided study still get calls from the school, although they can arrive later and are less reliable than their computerized counterparts, Kane said.

Since September, thousands of calls have been made to the homework hotline.

“The loop of communication is complete at this school,” said the 49-year-old Kane, who has won several educator-of-the-year awards during his three decades in the Conejo Valley Unified School District. “Come report card time, there should never be a surprise. No one can ever say that our school didn’t try with their kid.”

Dialing in for homework has been a boon for the Bilger family.

A few weeks ago, 13-year-old Brad Bilger missed a deadline when he turned in a rough draft of a project on the epic Old English poem “Beowulf” when a final draft was due. He made the mistake by failing to accurately copy down the assignment.

Though he hasn’t gotten his work back yet, tardy assignments get marked down a full letter grade for each day they are late.

“It was so disappointing to him,” said his mother, Marna, who is also the school’s PTA president. “He’s a conscientious student, and ironically, he thought he was ahead of the game. But obviously, he didn’t get all the information written down in his assignment book.”

Now the seventh-grader and his folks check the hotline two or three times a week.

*

“It’s a great idea,” Brad said. “It really helps. . . . Especially when you’re sick, you can call in that day. Or if you don’t really understand the homework you can call too.”

The PTA raised $5,000 for the hotline’s computer system, which includes software, hardware and two telephone lines.

Kane hopes to expand the system’s capabilities, and he is continually adding new databases and features to various programs. On his own time, often staying up until midnight, Kane recently has been entering individual test scores and grades so teachers can hand out detailed, computerized reports to parents about every three weeks. He’s also working on getting all his programs hooked up to the Internet.

Kane’s painstaking efforts do not go unappreciated.

“This has definitely helped,” said math department chairwoman Teresa Coffman. “Kids will miss the assignment, call five people and still get it wrong. Now they can just call the hotline.”

Even though the homework assignment is always listed on the blackboard, Coffman said it is a struggle at the end of a 45-minute period to remind students about it.

“The bell’s ringing and they’re walking out, and it’s not realistic that they’ll all get out their assignment notebook,” she said. “This makes all the difference in the world.”