Why Building Strong Relationships with Families is Essential

Family involvement is a crucial factor for student success. When families know what’s happening at school, they actively support their child’s teachers. This support not only transforms your school, but it also eases the load on educators. Fortunately, we’ve got practical tips for fostering robust school-home relationships and tools to engage families as valuable education partners.

Getting families involved doesn’t have to be time-consuming or complicated. With the tools provided by SchoolStatus Connect Advanced Tier, you can easily bridge school-home communication divides by providing resources and updates in the family’s preferred language and channel, including SMS, email, phone, and mass notifications. The centralized communication hub enables you to keep families informed and foster engaging relationships.

Start Building Relationships Early

There are many reasons to invite families into your classroom as stakeholders in their child’s education. Let’s just start with the simple fact that families know their children better than anyone. They know their strengths and challenges, and how best to support them. 

A great way to learn about students—while building relationships with families—is to solicit feedback from families right at the start of the school year (but it’s never too late to get started!). Embedding a survey in a class update ensures families can access it in their preferred language and share a response. Inviting participation in any form helps all families feel included in their child’s learning. 

Student achievement increases with family involvement:

Behavior Issues Decrease With Family Involvement

Students act differently when they know their teacher has a relationship with their home adults. Why? That child knows that if they act up in class or are struggling with other in-classroom challenges,, you’ll reach out to their families to let them know. Through a simple text with SchoolStatus Connect, you can quickly update a family on their student’s behavior—whether it’s a concern or to celebrate a success. Students would much rather come home to hear praise than be asked to explain why they were disrespectful in class, not engaged, or absent. 

If there are issues that need to be addressed, your 2-way communications allow you to discuss a plan for how best to handle the situation with the input from the family. 

School Success Increases With Family Involvement

Welcoming families into your classroom community will encourage them to attend class events and contribute to the success of the school. Event notification and volunteer coordination directly in the SchoolStatus Connect portal makes event management easy. Newsletters, emails, or texts can be sent to let families know when events are scheduled and how they can participate. Inviting families to bring refreshments for a class celebration or to volunteer time to help you decorate for the class play are great ways to engage. 

Is your school having a fundraiser? Involved families can be a HUGE asset in making these successful. Let’s say you’re selling items from a catalog. Families may not only share it on their social media, but they can also take the order sheet to their jobs and share it with their friends. Putting in the effort to help their child be successful can easily extend to helping the entire school community succeed.

An involved family might also volunteer for the PTA or PTO, take time to help with extra curricular activities at your school, or participate in a multicultural family celebration! Families want what is best for their child. Bringing that energy into your school can be transformative and inspiring for all.

The easy-to-use reporting of SchoolStatus Connect Advanced Tier lets you know which families are engaging and what channels they prefer

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