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Pritchardville Elementary has built parent engagement on three pillars: consistency, frequency and accessibility.
Family engagement is at the heart of education. When families are engaged, they are not only better able to support their student’s work in the class, but in a better position to extend that learning into the evenings and weekends at home.
Like the rest of us, though, parents are busy people, and even those who are most invested in their child’s education might fall out of the loop if schools don’t take steps to make communication clear and easy. At Pritchardville Elementary, we’ve found that the keys to successful communication and an engaged community are consistency, accessibility and frequency.
Creating Consistency with Tools and Tactics
Communication in our district used to be very inconsistent. Our district uses a school messaging service, so I would send out weekly schoolwide blurbs through that. If something needed to go out to an entire grade level or more, I would send that out for them as well.
Teachers were using whatever they were comfortable with. Some would create email newsletters; others used group chats to communicate with parents; and some others were creating Facebook groups for each class. The frequency, the type, even the medium of communication all really depended upon the individual teacher.
These days, we have a single communication tool, Bloomz, that our teachers utilize school-wide. We don’t need to worry about whether or not a teacher is diligent about checking family emails or how we’ll communicate with family members who aren’t on a certain social network anymore.
We give parents a classroom code and explain how to get enrolled in a class, and they can get up and running immediately. Some teachers might give kids an extra 15 minutes of recess if, say, 75 percent of their parents enroll right away, but usually the enrollment percentage is even higher than that because everyone has a smartphone on them these days. Not only is the process streamlined, but now it’s the same from classroom to classroom and across grades, so parents just have to turn to one app for all their child’s classes — and it follows them from year to year.
It’s also consistent within the class. Homework assignments, calendars and announcements are all hosted on the same app. Sign-up sheets or permission slips for field trips, volunteer opportunities, conferences, or anything else at the classroom or school level are all accessible through the same interface.