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Nearly all Frederick County parents use e-mail to connect with teachers, but they are not yet ready for it to replace conferences, even if they have to continue dealing with the scheduling problems that the face-to-face meetings create.

That's the major finding of a parent survey that Frederick County Public Schools conducted in October.

Nearly 18 percent of parents who have children in the school system (4,170) participated in the survey.

The survey found that 91 percent of parents use e-mail to contact teachers, compared to phone (42 percent), personal notes (43 percent), or planners and folders (42 percent).

About 51 percent of parents said they are not happy with the half-day conference schedule, and slightly more than two-thirds (68 percent) said they would prefer to have a full-day schedule.

But when those parents learned that such a schedule would cost the school system $1 million per day, the percentage dropped to 50-50.

"Our parents are mixed on this particular topic," said Resha Kreischer-Anderson, a school system data analyst and research specialist, who collected results from the survey.

Results of the survey were released last week, and will be one factor to help school officials decide how to handle parent-teacher conferences in the future.

Historically, parent-teacher conferences have been the biggest problem with the school system calendar for parents in Frederick County.

Because the school system holds parent-teacher conferences over three half-days in the fall and two half-days in the spring, parents regularly express concern about the loss of instructional time and the fact that the half-day scheduling creates a problem for working families.

School officials have been looking for a solution, and last year school board members even brought up the possibility of reducing the number of parent-teacher conferences or eliminating them.

Officials said they wanted to look for alternatives and explore how other counties handle conferences.

Montgomery County sets two half-days in the fall for mandatory parent-teacher conferences for elementary and middle schools. At the high school level, parents are encouraged to schedule their own meetings with teachers.

School systems in Carroll and Prince George's counties also have only one formal parent-teacher conference day built into their calendars.

In January, the school board directed a committee of parents, teachers and administrators to gather information about conference attendance, research the best practices in conference scheduling, and poll parents and teachers for their thoughts on conferences.

The parent survey was the first result of those efforts.

Parents answered questions about the reasons that bring them to conferences, about the ways they use to contact teachers as well as their thoughts on the conference schedule and alternatives.

The survey included two-open ended questions and more than 3,550 parents took time to write-in their answers.

Parents said they were dissatisfied with the current conference schedule because there are too many consecutive half-days of school, the school day is interrupted, the scheduling of conferences is archaic (parents have to go to school to sign up), and the 10-minute conference slots are just not enough.

Parents also recommended that the school system keep face-to-face conferences, but reduce the number delayed start times and asked school officials to come up with a system that allows parents to sign up for conferences online.

The survey also found that a majority of parents value conferences because they offer an opportunity for a face-to-face interaction with teachers. Ninety-four percent of parents who participated in the survey said that was the major reason why they attend conferences, and many parents recommended that the school system keep face-to-face conferences.

Although e-mails and the online Pinnacle grade system allow parents to monitor their children's performance at school, that is still not enough to replace the face-to-face interaction with teachers, said Daphne Gabb, the president of the Parent-Teacher Association Council of Frederick County.

"That is my only chance to see those teachers," said Gabb, who has children in middle and high school.

Gabb said conferences are the only time she can ask teachers how her children interact in class or whether they participate in discussions. "I can't get that from Pinnacle," she said.

Now that school officials have reviewed the results from the survey, officials will collect the other pieces of their requested research. They will collect data about the practices of other school systems, gather the recommendations from teachers and bring it all to the school board, when the board starts working on the 2010-2011 calendar.

Board members said they will take the survey results in consideration when they make their future decisions about conferences.

Board member Katie Groth however, noted that the survey only represents the opinion of a small portion of Frederick County parents and should be treated with caution. "We have to be careful about making big decisions based on such a small number of parents," she said.

E-mail Margarita Raycheva at mraycheva@gazette.net.