At the beginning of this school year, South phased out paper forms and instead introduced online forms for students. No longer do students receive a huge stack of papers to be filled out at the beginning of the year. Now, students and parents are expected to go onto Skyward where they will be able to find all of their forms. This sparked a lot of comments from students and administrators.  

“This is a great idea, but the forms are not as accessible as they should be,” junior Serena Dajani said.

Dajani went on to say that she and her family were unable to find the forms on the website altogether, and that they are currently waiting for paper forms to be made available.

She believes that technology is definitely the direction that South is headed in, but she said that her “stand is with paper.”    

Freshman Jasmine Hinkle also ran into problems while filling out her forms.

“I would [only] trust myself  putting [the forms] into the teacher’s hands,” Hinkle said.

She explained that not only did she have trouble finding her forms, but she also didn’t feel comfortable filling them out online.

August 20th is the deadline for the forms, and, according to Attendance Administrator Mary Koontz, only 1000 students have registered at this point in time. Koontz believes that not all students will have registered online by the deadline. She went on to say that paper copies will be made available after the deadline for those who have not filled out their forms yet and for the students without internet access.

Quite possibly the biggest problem with this new system is not its ‘inaccessibility’ according to students like Dajani and Hinkle, but instead, its difficulty catering to the needs of students without internet access. The point of this new movement is for everything to be done online, something that is not possible for students with no internet access. As of right now, the only solution to this problem is to offer paper versions to these students. However, this requires a lot of paper which is bad for the environment.

One major benefit of having online forms is South’s ability to save paper due to the numerous forms that are no longer on paper.

“There are a lot of schools around the country and the world,” said junior Tiffany Luong,  “If one school makes a difference I think it’s worth it… We need to make an effort [to save paper].”

Luong thought that South would be saving a lot of paper because of the new online forms. She talked about how important it was to try to reduce our carbon footprint and pointed out how online forms would contribute to that. Copious amounts of paper will be saved this year due to the introduction of online forms and that is certainly a major pro in the online forms column.

South has been making a point to introduce technology into its curriculum and into its registration process. There have been a lot of  pros and cons to this new system, but like any great thing, it requires time. This will be a system that will continue for years to come. Hopefully, students will be able to adjust to their new way of filling out papers.

“This system will be better and easier if it [continues] next year”  said Koontz.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.