STAFF ED: Questioning the QuikTip

According to its website, The School District of Clayton prides itself in developing “leaders who shape the world through independence, creativity and critical thinking.”

Yet, while nominally promoting students’ independence, not only through mission statements like the one aforementioned, but also through policies like Open Campus, a school district like ours cannot become blind to the reality and inevitably of conflict. Beneath the surface of such glamorous and frankly futile statements, all school districts have policies to deal with social inevitabilities.

In lieu of events students like us are kept from understanding, the District administration, in attempt to artificially yield a sense of transparency among the student and faculty bodies, subscribed to an application, called Quick Tip, that allows the District’s stakeholders to submit, anonymously, reports of information and activity, sometimes skeptical or controversial, pervading the school’s boundaries.

Yes, in hopes to achieve transparency, the District has turned to the one-most intransparent, perplexing medium on Earth: technology.

And, while few question technology’s capability to enhance educational experience, the School District has allowed it to become more than just a means of enriching students’ learning, rather allowing for it to manifest itself as an intermediary between the administration and what can be frankly classified as student drama.

And, although the app may prove itself efficacious in very specific contexts, its short tenure has already resulted in multiple awkward and accusatory conversations between students and their almost unbeknownst administrators.

One student’s first-ever conversation with an administrator was triggered by the click of a phone’s touch screen, and revolved around another student’s personal life.

The District’s mechanization and industrialization of inherently human processes is making foreign problems even more foreign, and it begs countless questions, some being: Why should technology ever be an agent for problem-solving in such a context? Why should we industrialize our relationships and the way in which we go about solving our problems? And aren’t there better, more rational and more human ways, to solve human problems?

A school district cannot conscientiously support and promote independence while simultaneously intervening in student-oriented issues unnecessarily, just as a school district cannot righteously attack and address a lack of transparency through the addition of an intransparent and fuzzy medium.

Let’s build real relationships that foster communication and create a culture as open as our campus is.

We really shouldn’t need an outside ingredient like technology to catalyze trust and communication internally.

Administrators should be tasked with more than just overseeing and bystanding the school’s culture; they should be the ones doing what they can to create it. .