Key points:
- School-home communication is critical for a healthy school community, but too often, communication efforts miss the mark
- Choosing the right system, protecting data, and including all parent groups are essential steps for success
- See related article: Here’s why we put all of our district communications on one platform
Implementing a unified communication solution focused on family engagement provides school districts with multiple benefits. An intuitive, easy-to-use program can standardize communication between school and home, for example, and increase overall family engagement.
Selecting the right K-12 communications platform that supports the needs of everyone and is purpose-built to engage families can save everyone time, increase technology adoption, save money, and diminish or eliminate any confusion.
It also helps districts avoid or address these top five school-home communication challenges:
1. Too many systems create too many messages and mass confusion. Parents and guardians are often overwhelmed by the volume of inbound messages and variety of messaging channels. As a result, they don’t know whether the school newsletter went into the spam folder, where the field trip permission slip is or how to add money to lunch accounts. In our district, we found that teachers and schools were using more than a dozen different platforms for family communication. Even the most engaged families shared that it was difficult to keep up with so much information in so many places.
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