Improve Your Parent Communications

In your preparation for the upcoming school year, are you thinking about how to better engage your parents? We all know how difficult that can be with everyone's hectic personal and work schedules, but it's essential to keep your parents informed. If you are struggling to get engagement and what you are currently doing hasn't been too successful, you might consider some different techniques. No reason to continue doing something that isn't working, right? Below are a few tactics and resources to consider:

• Start a Pinterest board with activities and ideas to help parents help their students at home. Pinterest is a fantastic resource with all sorts of potential to engage parents (especially moms!).
• Use your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or others) to heavily promote events at your schools and drum up parent support. Use these outlets to ask for help from your families!
• Use those same accounts to share fun school videos, photos of neat projects students are working on and other programs that you want to highlight for parents.
• Send out monthly digital newsletters to parents. Whether you use MailChimp, Constant Contact, a simple Word document or another tool, keeping parents informed of goings-on in your district/school/classroom may spark interest and a willingness to contribute their time or money. The added benefit to a digital newsletter is that it won't get lost on the way home with a student! As a side note, we use Mailchimp for these newsletters, and you can send up to 12,000 emails a month for free as long as your list of subscribers is limited to 2,000.
• Check out these additional resources/ideas from Education World on how to get parents connected.
• What about your ELL parents? Check out this page for helpful ideas on how to engage your parents whose first language is something other than English.

We know how difficult it can be yet how important it is to engage parents in their children's education, so I hope these tips give you some new ideas to try out. If you have others that have been successful for you, please share so that we can distribute that information to other schools!