Dive Brief:
- Students with informed and engaged parents are better about completing homework, make higher grades, are more likely to graduate and have better attitudes about school and themselves, eSchool News reports in an article that shares strategies from four school districts on how to improve communications.
- Parents increasingly want communication to come through technology such as social media accounts, email, phone calls and text messages. Using social media management platforms, such as SchoolMessenger K-12 Social Media Management, helps this endeavor.
- Schools also empower and involve parents by making sure they have access to sources of communication through methods such as supplying them with devices and hotspots, offering workshops and parent academies to keep them current on school and technology changes, offering online tutoring help and providing online resources that can help their children succeed.
Dive Insight:
Most parents feel a vested interest in seeing their child succeed. However, they cannot participate in the process as fully as they would like to without the information and tools they need to understand academic expectations, homework deadlines and specific requirements for assignments. By forming strong home-school partnerships, schools can enlist valuable allies in educating students.
In the past, helping students succeed generally meant that parents would sit down with children to encourage them to do their homework and help them when they struggled. However, with the use of new teaching methods and technologies, many parents feel ill-equipped to work with students. They need guidance in the form of workshops, academies and online resources so that they feel empowered in the process.
To be responsive to the needs of parents, schools are increasingly using digital communication strategies to send digital flyers to parents about school events and after-school activities. There are other school-tested tips and tools that may aid schools in making parent connections. The trick is finding which tools work best for your school and community, and streamlining communication as much as possible to not overwhelm parents — especially at the beginning of the school year.