Parent communication and engagement is one of the most essential parts of how schools can help students recover from the pandemic’s impacts on learning.
Schools are just part of the instructional environment for students. Learning also happens at home, when students complete homework assignments, study, and read with their families. Positive relationships and two-way parent communication between K-12 schools and families help set students up for better outcomes in school and life. In San Marcos CISD, our strategic use of technology has positively impacted our school district’s efforts to engage our community stakeholders as partners in student success.
When I joined the San Marcos CISD communications team in 2017, our district was rebranding. Our main goal was to build more positive relationships between our schools and the community. At the time, communication was not centralized, and educators and staff were using various tools to communicate with families.
In 2018, we brought on SchoolStatus, a comprehensive education communications, analytics, and workflow platform, to unify district communications. As teachers and staff began using the platform daily for communication and engagement, we saw a dramatic increase in conversations with students’ families. In the 2020-21 school year alone, our district educators and families exchanged more than 1.5 million text messages. Since then, we’ve grown our use of technology for parent communication by adding Smore, which allows us to easily create visually appealing newsletters to connect with our community.
5 keys to parent communication
Based on our experiences engaging families in our district, here are five recommendations for improving school-home communication. These can be applied in any district to help support true school-community partnerships.
1. Make connecting easy for parents with unified district communication systems: We focus on making connecting with our schools easy and convenient for families. We don’t want our parents to have to navigate from app to app or website to website with different logins for multiple systems. We have unified our district communications by putting everyone on the same platform. There’s no app for parents to download, and they can receive communications in their preferred format—text, email, phone call, or even a video chat.
We know students’ families are busy and balancing a lot. Finding a system that fit into their schedules to make it convenient for them to engage with our schools was a crucial part of the success of our system. Our unified communications system makes it easier for parents to stay updated and involved. Parents can stay connected through one system whether they have one or multiple children in our district.
Having one communications platform also helps with accountability. Having automatic logs of communications helps protect our staff and students’ families with documentation of interactions.
2. Offer translation to remove communication barriers for families in your district: We have a lot of Spanish speakers in our community, and having translation built into our system was important to us. Automatic translation into the language spoken at home has been a game-changer for our teachers. Having tools that allow our families to receive information from our schools in their native language is efficient.
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Our teachers love having translation built into the platform because they can communicate with all families. With one click, the platform translates messages from teachers to families. They don’t have to go to a separate tool to translate the information and send it to each family. We can also translate our newsletters between school and home quickly and easily. Having built-in translation is just a win-win for everybody.
3. Provide engaging newsletters with key information families need to know: Newsletters help us pull out the essential items families need to know each week and are a great way to enhance daily two-way communication. We send out a district-wide weekly newsletter called the “Rattler Recap.” We can quickly put the Rattler Recap together and send out the link instantly to our families. Families don’t have to navigate through a lot of content on our website to find the information they need for the week.
We can also easily create visually appealing designs using Canva and include them in our newsletters. The integration with Canva and easy-to-use design tools helped take our newsletters to the next level. Our weekly newsletter that goes out to every district family averages about 8,000 views, and we have about 8,400 students. Newsletters provide an arena where parents are engaged and allow us to deliver weekly information effectively.
4. Incorporate stakeholder ideas and content to generate excitement about your district’s communications: To create excitement and get your stakeholders to read your district communications, create systems that allow them to suggest ideas and content. Our students are excited when they see themselves in the “Rattler Recap.” They now come to us and ask if they can be in the newsletter. We have teenagers who often shy away from the spotlight, excited to be included. The most rewarding part of our work is seeing the students’ responses.
And, of course, parents love to see that excitement and have their kids highlighted in our school-home communications. We’ve seen more parents asking about getting their children featured in the newsletter and reaching out to ask us to come to an event to take photos for the newsletter. So, now they feel like they’re a part of the promotion of their district. And that it’s their district too. And that’s the best feeling as a communications person.
5. Share individual student updates and feedback to build meaningful relationships: We can’t build meaningful, positive relationships with families without engaging them on an individual level. In our district, educators use our communications platform to update families on individual students and their school progress.
I’m a parent in the district as well as a staff member. A big fear as a parent is sending your kid off to school and not knowing how they’re doing during the school day. Also, from a behavioral standpoint, you want to know your child is making good choices and being a positive part of the school community. We can maintain those individual parent relationships with regular two-way communication. It’s the best feeling as a parent to get these updates on how my children are doing in school.
Finding the right technology tools has been a significant part of our efforts to engage families and include them in their children’s schools. By using technology and making communications systems easy for our stakeholders, we’re tapping into the power of community engagement to support student success.
We have leaders in our district who allowed us to try new approaches, and those innovations have led to a great learning environment. We’re thankful to have the opportunities to innovate because the changes we have made have led to big rewards. We want our students’ families to be engaged as part of our school communities, and embracing technology has helped allow that to happen.
