Today's Newsletter: Improving Communications

Progressive Education Revisited—Guest post by Steven Baule, Superintendent at Muncie Community Schools, Indiana: Communication seems to always be an issue for schools. Once, I had a parent contact me upset that we hadn’t communicated Item A to her and she stated, “normally, you are so good with communication.” The principal involved was a bit mad about that call, so she took time to enumerate the 27 ways she had communicated that item, from robo-phone call through letters home to signs in front of the school. The point of the story is really two fold. One, you can never communicate enough and two, short of home visits to each family, someone will still miss the information. So, what can schools do to more proactively communicate? Using social media is a simple way to expand your schools’ communications options. Using a message pre-scheduling tool like Hootsuite helps manage a variety of accounts easily. There are, of course, other alternatives found in this Sprout article from last summer. NAESP provides a summary of four excellent Apps for parent engagement: SeeSaw, ClassDojo, Remind, and Instagram. The NEA has a page on their website called 11 Ideas for better communications. Remember, technology alone will not solve any school’s communications issues, but technology can help to spread the word.