Cost Effective Communication with Parents...What's Your Style??

[Lisa Bradt]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post, so I hope I am doing it right. I have been mulling over ideas about how our school could create a more cost effective and environmentally friendly communication strategy with parents. Our website is in the process of being updated so this is not an option as of now but hopefully will be in the near future. I proposed a thought that I had to our principal. It was to create a database of e-mail addresses of parents so that things such as the newsletter from the school and council, reminders of upcoming events, etc. could be sent quickly and easily at the touch of the button. She is unaware of any schools in our board doing such a thing and is thinking that it might be too much of an endeavour to collect, maintain and update the e-mail list. She would prefer to purchase SynerVoice which is essentially the same thing as the e-mail thought but with phone numbers and the home receives a call from the school automatically. In addition to this, it is quite expensive...I believe over $2,000 for the hardware/data system. I do think that this is a good option as well, but lengthy newsletters could not be read over the phone so a hard copy would still need to be photocopied and dispersed. Basically it would just be for reminders of upcoming events. With the e-mail route, parents would have an electronic format readily available so that the pile of papers from school might diminish slightly (wishful thinking I think).

So, my question to you is this...Is your school utilizing a cost-effective, environmentally friendly communication system that you think would be beneficial for other schools to know about? If by chance they are using an e-mail/telephone system, have there been troubles associated with the collection of e-mail addresses or phone numbers?

Thanks for any info that you can share. I appreciate it.

[Gay Stephenson]

I'm going to ask Ross Button to respond to your post. He's part of our community here and his family of schools may communicate by email. Electronic communication is one of his professional specialties. Dan has this professional expertise too, and is very involved in his own school council. This is an excellent question for us to be pondering... thanks for posting it.

Synervoice is a great tool. One advantage may be that some of us are more likely to check phone messages daily than email! The school keeps family's telephone numbers on file anyway - so you can understand why synervoice is more convenient option from their point of view. Perhaps schools should consider asking for email addresses at registration, to facilitate parent to parent communication. It does facilitate environmentally friendly communication.


Years ago, there was also a concern about not being able to reach every family via email because not everyone had access to a computer. But statistics indicate that is changing. About 85% of 15 year olds report having a computer at home. Some may not have access to the internet, and in rural areas, connections are likely to be dial-up. (Not good for receiving large attachments). It would still be important to find ways to reach families without email access. However, email may be one of the best ways to reach large numbers of parents.


My son and daughter's high schools in Toronto (they attended two different ones) both had synervoice. Both schools used it as a way of letting parents know that their child had missed "one or more classes" that day - which was useful! But one school also used it to phone every family the week of school council meetings, parent-teacher nights etc (a suggestion parents made). We also experimented with including a message in one other language, for parents who didn't understand English. We had good results reaching more parents that way - in high school, you really can't rely on teenagers bringing notices home in their backpacks! I look forward to reading more responses.

[Sheila Stewart]

Gay, you have described a fair bit how our board uses synrevoice. It is system wide--each school can use it for communications or something can be put out to all schools. High schools use it for missed classes as you described above. Many schools use it for announcing events, school council meetings, reminders, etc! Most come over the weekend. It is especially useful at the high school level, when yes, print materials may never make it home!

At the school level, some school councils collect emails from parents (those who willingly give it) and they, or the SC Chair, keep them in the loop (whether they are members or not). It generally needs consent from each parent though (unlike synrevoice), but does help the school council in their role of communicating to the parent community. It can make the principal nervous it seems, but working together helps build the trust in this.

At the high school where I am school council co-chair we are discussing new ways to outreach to parents through the school's website and possibly a separate email account they can use to leave messages for school council parent members. Our meeting minutes and notices are already on the website. Most elementary schools post the monthly newsletters on their individual websites, but I am not sure how many parents go on to look. Most still send out the paper copies in the backpacks. We use the school's newsletter to remind parents to look for the school council news on the school's site which is accessed through the board's website. But again, the paper may not get home in the first place!?

Rural parents have dial up concerns too, and often prefer the hard copies to come home. One strategy may not please everyone!

[Lorna Costantini]

Hi everyone. While implementing the Parent Reaching Out project at Niagara Catholic, we found that communicating with parents at an individual school was very successful using the automated phone call out system. It was generally user friendly and more parents received the information. We found that many parents were very happy to receive information about events and happenings in the school using this format. It does not, however, support two way conversations.That is a significant barrier for School Councils when they need to get input from their school community.
Email lists work well if parents can opt in and subscribe to news. Niagara Catholic has established an e-community to communicate to parents and the community the latest news and announcements.

Electronic communications like anything else can have problems An issue that surfaces from time to time is the lack of respect and good sense of the individuals posting comments and ideas. Schools at the Centre has an excellent acceptable use policy and serves as a good model for schools to use. Sheila is right on when she says we need to look at a variety of communication methods.

One of the easiest ways for parents to collaborate and post information is the free format offered in blogs and ning networks like this one.

[Ross Button]

Our school hasn't tried the type of system you are describing; basically a PUSH type of mechanism either email or phone number based.

Either one would be a great idea and both share the same need for list management be it email id or phone number.

Our high school and elementary school are just getting consistent at keeping their web site up to date. At the high school we have discussed a regular advertisement in the local paper.

I tried to startup a blog type of system with our elementary school but the inertia was more powerful than the new technology/approach. We have four children in school now and see a few teachers sending out 'here is what I am teaching' types of paper communiques. That is the real issue.

Not only is communication enabling technology required, something to communicate is required. It is a bit of chicken and egg. If there is a platform and way to communicate, teachers and admin may get on board and use it. But it is kind of hard to build the business case to put communication technology in place if there is nothing to communicate. And then who to.

To work, there needs to be an audience of parents out there ti receive the communications. This gets us right back to the issue of collecting and managing email addresses. Or phone numbers. At first blush, it seems like we'd be adding work and not adding value.

It will be a long road to bring our educators in line with today's 'web 2.0' communications environment.

I'd suggest tackling one class and teacher at a time. Maybe using a zing type of platform. My hypothesis is that you'd get less than half of the teachers in a given school who would be willing and/or able to do it. Then once the information has been generated, use a rss-to-email distributor or zing itself to spread the message.

One teacher, 20-30 parents at a time.

Interesting, I've seen that in each of the groups I'm involved in related to my kids there is one family without email. So there is that one odd man out but the other way to see it is that over 90% are email equipped. Most sports teams are only using email now a days to communicate. We have communications related to minor league sports teams on the net but the educators of our children aren't there.

just a few scattered sunday morning with a coffee thoughts

ross

[Ross Button]

one think i forgot to mention is the use of email and yahoo groups by school councils in our family of schools

a few school councils have been using yahoo groups to enhance school council communications mainly for email group lists and a calendar that auto sends reminders for meetings

we have used this effectively when dealing with school board issues but it is 5-20 parents per school and 8 schools

we haven't addresses the school to all parents communications

[Carmelle]

Hi Lisa, We have done this in every school I have been a part of. At the beginning of the year, we send a note home asking for emails to be added to a list for exactly the purposes you have shared. As school council chairperson, I have sat at the front door during parent teacher conferences and collected these email addresses from every parent that walks in, just to complete the list. We still send a paper copy home, but the email is very handy for parents and much more timely in some cases (as students get older they tend to bring less paper home).We have one school in our town where the principal sends an update home every monday with the week's activities listed. You can see those at www.lrsd.ab.ca/schools/ces/
He sends over 200 per week, and there are no issues with file size (pdf format), or sending to parents that live in the country with no high speed internet. We have also started a NIng site at http://wmsparents.ning.com/
This site is easy to update and is a place for parents to connect, outside of the school website.
Some of our schools also use Synervoice, but I agree that the email list is much more flexible for documents.
C.
Hope that helps...

[Jan Sugerman]

I wonder if this site here isn't an example of how people can communicate in a very easy way. Lorna mentioned blogs and ning networks and they really aren't all that difficult to use. Certainly for parent groups it would be a way for parents to chat and post all sorts of things. I wonder how extensive the internet is now and how many parents actually have computers that are connected to the internet. I have heard that in rural areas dial up is still used and I suspect that can be frustrating for sharing images and videos.

[Gay Stephenson]

I'm loving this discussion!

Sheila - I really appreciated your comment regarding parents having a way of mass communicating with one another via email "It can make the principal nervous it seems, but working together helps build the trust in this." I'd be interested in knowing more about how you build the trust. Would the principal be c.c.'d on the mass communication for instance? Building trust in the relationship between parents and schools is vital. And there are some discussions here regarding problems of trust. Where the principal "approves" every school council effort or communication. So letting go of that control, and trusting or finding the new parameters would be challenging.

Carmelle - your school council in Alberta has a NING site. Amazing!

[Jan Sugerman]

Carmelle your NING site is lovely. Very welcoming...

[Ross Button]

In both our school council and family of school councils email (yahoo groups) networks, the principals are a member of the network but just like a School Council. A member but not the leader.

In Ontario, the Principal is a member of the School's Parent Council but does not have a vote. Nor should they run the meetings.

So, they participate but the parents run the show.

[Jacqui Strachan]

I think it is a great idea to collect parents' emails. It may not be a perfect system, but the data can be put into a simple excel file so that it is fairly easy to update. I am the school council chair at my son's high school, and we try to have an email sign-up list at every event. We have over 150 parents on the list now - by no means the whole school, but it is growing slowly.

I think it would be a good idea if one of the million forms that we get home at the beginning of each school year is a simple form saying something like: "Keep informed about what is happening at our school. Please complete this form with your name, phone number and email address to receive regular updates". Most people these days have an email address, and it is a far more reliable method of communication than my son's grungy backpack, I can assure you! :-)

You can either start a new list each year, or do what I do and leave people on until they ask to be taken off! Some alumni parents may enjoy the ongoing connection, and if not, it is easy to ask to be removed. There is some work involved when inputting the email addresses, but it is a great volunteer job, and it shouldn't take too long. Having gone through the experience of phone messages being erased and paper notes being forgotten/lost, email is one of the more reliable ways of getting messages to parents, so I use it whenever I can.
Jacqui

[Sheila Stewart]

Hold that thought/question, Gay! Re: Trust! Be in touch soon!