Reminder: All CDL Schools Should Update Cityspan by Friday, February 17th

This is a follow-up note to the announcement we made in the fall that the CDL has moved to the mandatory use of Cityspan for student rostering and meeting attendance.

Each CDL school must log in to Cityspan using their individual log-in (we can provide you with this if you don’t have it now) and update their student enrollment and attendance for debate by Friday, February 17th.

This year, we’ve moved away from using spreadsheets to keep student rosters and moved to what we feel is a simpler, easier online system, Cityspan. Just as in previous years, a condition of receiving the third disbursement of your school’s coaching stipend this year, and participating in the Chicago Debate League next season, is that your school must complete its student roster and complete an update of your squad’s meeting attendance.

Not only is this a requirement from CPS for each school, it’s also important to the league as a whole and helps the work you’ve done make its full impact. We need to know which students have taken part on your debate team so we can recognize just how many students we’re impacting and have better data on what the academic benefits to them are by using the online database. We’re counting on coaches to help us not just to meet a requirement, but to help us get a new level of detail in our understanding of the work that our League is doing, and eventually on the impact that all of our efforts are having on our students.

Who should be included in this? Not only your students who have attended a tournament this year but students you consider a part of your team during the course of the year who have attended multiple practices.

We’ve recently spent a decent amount of time looking at the system and trying it out.  What we’ve discovered is that it will take a solid 20-30 minutes of time to get everything set up, though updates from that point on are standard and quick to do. The database automatically includes the names of every student at your school, making it easy to search for their names without having to type them in, and once they’re entered and you’ve entered your practice schedule, updating attendance for each practice is relatively painless. You don’t need to be a technology whiz to use the Cityspan website by any means.

Please remember to enter tournament dates and hours too – we’ve noticed that many schools that are current with their practice attendance haven’t added tournament dates to their team’s event schedule. It’s easy to do – you’d select “add single event” and put the dates and hours for the tournaments we’ve had so far, all of which you can find on our Season Calendar.

Full details and instructions are available in our Cityspan Guide. If you need help, please contact us with questions. Gladys Reyes of CPS, who has done a great job helping some schools already to navigate and use the website, is also available to help you at gereyes1@cps.k12.il.us or 773-553-3934.