What 1,000 Families Want Your District to Know About School-Home Communication

Published August 22, 2024 on eSchool News.

Can you point to that moment where a teacher said or did something that changed the course of your life? I certainly can. In my case, it wasn’t what the teacher said to me. It was what she said to my mother.

The reason I even graduated from high school was because my mom ran into my English teacher at the grocery store when I was in 10th grade, and the teacher mentioned that I’d missed class–a lot, actually. That chance encounter saved me from dropping out. 

My mom also happened to be a teacher, so you better believe I started showing up to school daily and made up for the work I’d missed. But what I learned from that moment was how important it is to keep families looped into what’s really happening with their kids at school. Because left in the dark, even the most well-intentioned parents can’t step in to course-correct before it’s too late. I became determined to bridge that communication gap between schools and home.

I started down that path as the youngest school technology director in my home state of Mississippi’s history. But I quickly learned that one-size-fits-all methods didn’t even come close to getting the job done. The tool we needed didn’t exist. For true engagement, we needed two-way communication: conversations based on data, in languages families understand, and tailored to each child’s needs.

I started my journey with that vision of seamless school-home communication. And more than a decade later, I’m still on a mission to empower families with insights and open doors for supportive interventions and greater collaboration between families, teachers, and administrators.

This past winter, my team was laser-focused on integrating six different companies into one cohesive set of solutions to better tackle some of the monumental struggles schools are experiencing–like chronic absenteeism. In the midst of this, I had my daughter’s parent-teacher conference.  I am that parent who’s guilty of missing information in the firehose of communications that come home from school because they are often school-wide announcements and rarely have anything to do with my specific child. But the parent conference was solely about my kid and had my full attention.

Read the full article on eSchool News.