Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Jamal Haider created SchoolCity.com to help parents, students and teachers stay in touch.
Start-up founder found a way to stay involved
By Kara Chalmers
For many busy Silicon Valley parents, keeping up with their children's homework, soccer matches and even teachers' names is a challenge. A new Internet company, the brainchild of Saratogan Jamal Haider, aims to make life more manageable for parents--and also for teachers and students.
The idea for SchoolCity.com blossomed a year ago, when Haider and his wife, a former schoolteacher, were discussing how nice it would be to communicate easily with their children's teachers about what was going on in the classrooms. At the time, Haider was logging long hours as director of marketing at Centaur Technology, a start-up microprocessor company.
"I work very hard in everything I do," Haider said. "And every time I was at work until late or I was traveling somewhere, I felt kind of guilty because I wanted to stay in touch with what my kids were learning. When I go home, I want to make sure that I'm up to speed on what they do on a daily basis and what's happening at school."
Haider began looking at different schools' websites for ideas on how parents can be better informed about their children's education. He found many of the sites that existed were outdated and lacked a way for parents, teachers and students to interact.
Because schools typically can't afford to hire people to maintain their websites, Haider responded with SchoolCity. The site launched Oct. 19, and has had tremendous success, he said. Today, 150 schools in 18 states are registered with SchoolCity, and Haider's goal is to increase the number to 3,000 within the next year. Although the site's content is geared toward high schools and middle schools, Haider plans to expand to elementary schools by spring.
SchoolCity allows parents to email teachers, and it allows teachers to create virtual classrooms in which they can assign students homework and practice quizzes online.
Students can visit monitored chat rooms to talk to peers or to get extra help from teachers, who work one-on-one with students or with students as a group.
The Haider children, ages 5, 6 and 8, attend Argonaut School, which is not yet registered. But they still use the site's resources for class projects and read the articles by staff writers, as does Haider himself.
SchoolCity was partly designed to remedy the fact that many students, even young children, are far ahead of adults in Internet technology, Haider said. People with no prior computer programming skills or knowledge of HTML can participate in SchoolCity. For example, as long as teachers are familiar with a word processing program, such as Microsoft Word, they will be able to publish online.
SchoolCity also offers online classes to teachers to help bridge the technology gap, Haider said.
Virginia Petitt, a computer teacher at Phoenix High School in Phoenix, Ore., learned through a friend of SchoolCity's online class for teachers. She has since created her own home page and is planning her virtual classroom.
Petitt says that for her the class was a way for her to meet other teachers online.
"It's always interesting to see what's going on at other schools," she said. "What I'm hoping to get from the site is new ideas for projects."
SchoolCity is also a vehicle for schools to raise funds. Twenty percent of banner ads on the site are reserved for the schools to sell to local advertisers. All revenue goes directly to the schools. Schools can establish their own online store, where they can display clothing, books or other items for sale. SchoolCity also operates its own online store. If registered SchoolCity parents, students and teachers buy products through it, a 1 percent to 25 percent cut goes to the users' schools.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
