Students can now register their parents for My Jumbo, a Web service that allows the parents access to certain personal information about their children, including their grades.
The service is part of a new Web site called WebCenter for Parents that the offices of Student Services and Undergraduate Education announced to the student body on April 13.
About 700 parents have already been registered by their children, according to Associate Director of Arts and Sciences Information Technology Andrew Sonnenschein.
From that number, he estimated that about 400 students have already used the new service, which exceeds the amount he had predicted.
"Its more successful than I suspected for this time," he said.
Because the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) restricts parents' access to certain information without the consent of their adult children, students have the ability to deny their parents access to the site by not registering them.
But once registered for the service, parents can see their children's grades and information about their bursar's accounts. There is no way to enable access to financial and account information alone; registering a parent will allow him or her access to a student's grades.
The larger WebCenter for Parents Web site, of which My Jumbo is a part, has been in the works for a little over a year and has several components that are accessible for parents even without the consent of their children.
Among them are a menu with links to general information about academics, financial matters and administrative notices; an event calendar; and a scroll of information from the Office of Communications that "parallels the Tufts home page," according to Dean of Student Services Paul Stanton.
Students have had mixed reactions to My Jumbo.
Sophomore Cory Blodgett does not plan to sign his parents up for it. "I tell my parents all my grades anyway," he said. "[This] negates the independence that you gain when you get out of high school and into college."
Others are not opposed to registering their parents.
"I don't really have a problem with it," sophomore Dan Cuzzocreo said. "If my parents ask me to sign them up for it, I will ... I feel like my parents are paying for school, so they deserve to be seeing my grades."
The idea for WebCenter for Parents "came from a number of different places," according to Stanton.
The content of the Web site is responsive to input that Student Services received from a team of people who regularly takes phone calls from parents and who are familiar with the types of questions they usually have, according to Stanton.
The Student Services Office also contacted representatives from the Financial Aid Office, the Dean of Students Office, the Career Services Offices, as well as from other places, Sonnenschein said.
"All of their Web masters decided what would be appropriate," he said.
Stanton and Sonnenschein also said that the new service makes sense given some current trends.
"[It's] a trend in higher education that parents are far more involved today than they were 10 years ago," Stanton said. "[Parents] ask more questions [and] are more connected." Part of this connectedness comes from increases in technology, he said.
According to Sonnenschein, the level of dependence on technology made the new service seem very practical. "It's common sense to go online," he said.
Regardless of whether or not their children sign them up for My Jumbo, parents will have the opportunity to update their contact information on WebCenter for Parents, according to Sonnenschein. This will allow the university to be able to maintain accurate e-mail lists for important announcements, he said.
Prior to the creation of the site, administrators were only able to mail information to parents. "If there's a serious event on campus, [using e-mail] allows the dean of students to get in touch with parents a lot quicker," Sonnenschein said.
Parents will be informed of WebCenter for Parents by mail shortly after classes end, Stanton said.
