Parent-teacher conferences will be held this Thursday, Oct. 27 beginning at 4:00 p.m. at Niles West. Parents had the opportunity to schedule conference appointments with their child’s teachers online.

Parents are encouraged to attend conferences in order to discuss their student’s academic performance. Those who signed up for conferences this year will have the opportunity to have face-to-face time with their child’s teachers.

“The goal for [conferences] is for a parent/guardian to have time for individual discussions about their student (how they are progressing, grades, behavior, etc.). That is opposed to Open House, which is more of a general overview of how the classes run,” assistant principal Mark Rigby said.

Conferences are organized based off of how many slots a teacher has available.

“We have about 75 percent of the conference appointment times filled [as of Friday morning]; that is a good number. It is done by individual appointments, and we have 4425 individual appointments scheduled. Doing some quick math, if you assume each parent/guardian comes to meet with a few of their child’s teachers (say 4 per parent/guardian), then 4425/4 would give you about 1100 parents/guardians attending. That’s a very good number,” Rigby said.

While conferences give parents a way to interact with teachers, some are unhappy about the rushed environment.

“We go to conferences in order to see and interact with Weronika’s teachers, get to know them a bit better, and to see how she’s doing. We wish it was a bit more effective, though, since we can’t really get into a deep conversation with a teacher since meetings are only 5 minutes long,”Andy Jozwiak, father of senior Weronika Jozwiak, said. “We [find it funny] that we come to the teacher, sit down, and then soon have to leave. We also don’t like how we have a short amount of time to run around the school from classroom to classroom. However, overall, we still go to conferences to learn about her life at school from an academic perspective.”

Some parents find conferences unnecessary.

“We don’t have time [to go to conferences] and my daughter just shows us her grades online. She’s never had any issues in class or with a teacher that resulted in a parent-teacher meeting, so there really is no point in us going,” Farhat Shalwani, mother of senior Saba Shalwani, said.

Students will have a 2:11 p.m. early release on Thursday to give teachers time to prepare before conferences, and there will be no school on Friday.