COMMUNICATING WITH PARENTS
By Jennifer Powell
Welcome back everyone!
Like all of you, I’m busy with new students, schedules, student and teacher requests; the list goes on…. Every year, one of our most important goals is to keep strong communication with parents and students. We accomplish this in several ways. At the beginning of the year we have Parent Informational Meetings for each grade level. We hold these in the evening for our parent’s convenience. We will try and cover the material that students need for that specific year and answer any questions that they or their parents may have. We also send out an informational “Welcome Back” letter prior to the first day of school….again, specific to grades, we list any important information that a student or parent might need. An example is a list of dates and registration times for the ACT goes in the 11th grade and 12th grade letters.
In addition, our office for the past several years has been using a very successful tool for communicating with our parents. We call it the on-line Daily Newsletter. Every day school-wide announcements are read to our students during their homeroom period. These announcements come from the Principal’s Office and are usually day to day information….deadlines, practice times, etc. However, we have found that it’s a good place to post information on scholarships, college information and other “counseling office” notices. This is information is not only useful to our students, but also to our parents. Copies of these announcements are sent to us by email from the principal, so it is an easy step for the counselors to daily forward them on to the parents. What we’ve done to access email addresses is to ask parents to send us a request to receive the newsletter via email and then copy and paste their addresses to the distribution list. In addition to the daily announcements, we often send information on parent and student resources, helpful websites and dates and deadlines that may not be listed in the regular announcements. Feedback has been very positive and each year our distribution list grows.