What Parents Told Me How They Keep Up With School Communication

Introduction: Much to Keep Up With

At the beginning of the school year, there is much to keep up with. School communication is abundant, from information about meet-the-teacher days to pick-up policies and anything in between.

As a parent of two school-age kids, I’ve received messages about drop-off and pick-up policies, new teacher introductions, classroom expectation papers, technology policy contracts, and school supply lists.

Yet, during the first weeks of school, I often have to scour through my emails to locate a specific message. My husband and I compare our inboxes, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks in this time of preparedness. I check my kids’ backpacks for papers they might’ve forgotten to hand me. It is a heightened time, and occasionally overwhelming, not always knowing if messages are missed or appropriate actions are taken.

The experiences we mark in our own lives are often quietly shared by others. Wanting to better understand how families experience school communication at the start of a new school year, I reached out to parents across state borders and formed a focus group of twelve, most with children in public schools. I asked them: As the school year begins, how do you keep up with communication? What works — and what doesn’t?

What works for you in school communication? And, what doesn’t work for you?

The School Messages Parents Value Most

First, let’s begin by focusing on the communication received in the first weeks of school, and what communication is most important to parents.

Jeff, a father in Cambridge, Massachusetts, stated his top priorities are the school calendar, photo day reminders, and the list of every educator working with his child, especially special education staff. Tiffany in Palm Bay, Florida, shared a similar list:

“The school calendar, teacher contact information, supply lists, and drop-off and pick-up procedures are what I need most.”

Parents also valued teacher introductions and reminders about accommodations. Jeremy, from Peoria, Illinois, stressed how essential contact information is:

“The initial greeting from a teacher is the most important. It tells me how best to contact them. That is the single most vital piece of information.”

Amy, in Madison, Wisconsin, highlighted the routine notes she relies on, such as reminders to return library books on Mondays. As a parent of multiple children with IEPs, she also pointed to a gap in early communication:

“I don’t typically receive communication about accommodations before the year starts. I have to rely on last year’s meetings or quick conversations at open house. More communication for IEP parents prior to the school year would be great.”

In short, parents emphasized wanting to hold on to school calendars, supply lists, teacher contact details, and drop-off procedures.

The Struggle to Locate School Communication

“To ensure I can access these [emails] quickly, I save them in a dedicated email folder and take screenshots to store in my phone’s photo album.”

The methods parents use to hold on to the important school messages can get elaborate. Parents repeatedly say that they’ve created special email folders for school communication. When on the phone, they take screenshots of the messages and store them in their photo albums.

“To ensure I can access these [emails] quickly, I save them in a dedicated email folder and take screenshots to store in my phone’s photo album,” (Tiffany, Palm Bay, Florida)

Remembering to drag-and-drop school communication emails to their designated folders can get tedious. And, when one’s inbox gets flooded with other emails, the messages can get missed. Michael, a busy father of five children from Charleston, West Virginia, draws the reality,

“If I don’t save them [emails] right away, they’re gone (like 100% lost and forgotten). I’ll usually screenshot them or throw them in a folder on my computer.”

Tiffany and Michael represent the organized parent type who navigate managing multiple folders on their computer. However, many parents don’t use storage methods and try to catch the messages in real time. These parents need to make email searches to locate the messages later.

Jon from Bluffon, South Carolina, acknowledges that the search method can be unreliable:

“I keep track of school communications via email. Sometimes it is difficult to find the exact email I’m looking for, especially when it’s been several months.”

Amy, a stay-at-home mom in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, describes her experience with ClassDojo. She likes that she can contact teachers quickly, but compared the platform’s feed-like design to social media:

“ClassDojo works more like social media, I feel. Someone from the school staff will make a “post” and if you want to go back and find that specific post, you need to go scrolling through a sea of posts to find the one that you’re looking for which is inconvenient.”

In addition to email folder archiving, searches of the inbox, scrolling info from school communication apps, and taking screenshots, one parent went as far as printing out every school message and organizing them in dedicated binders. These methods work only with constant effort, but even then, essential details can still slip through the cracks.

Too Many Channels, Too Little Clarity

Ashley, a parent in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with two kids, who are in 2nd and 5th grade, captured the sense of scattered communication overload:

“With one child in primary school and the other in elementary, the amount of emails can get overwhelming, and it is easy to miss something important.”

Ashley wished all updates would live in her school’s Alma app instead of being spread across different platforms.

Tiffany in Palm Bay, Florida, pointed out how messages often arrive piecemeal from various sources, making it far too easy to miss something critical. She states,

“The greatest challenge I face is that messages often come from multiple sources, teachers, the main office, and activity coordinators, making it easy to overlook something important.”

Amy described the split between her children’s schools: elementary messages came through ClassDojo, while middle school information was delivered through Infinite Campus. She preferred Infinite Campus for its reliability, but missed the easy teacher connection she had on ClassDojo.

Lindsey, a mother of two girls in Atlanta, Georgia, praised text updates:

“It is so much easier to keep up with them and search for specific messages.”

However, she continues by acknowledging that she receives clutter that’s not intended for her,

“I get a lot of the spam school messages too, though, which I don’t really care for, but it’s not bad.”

The frustration of parent communication is not solved by simply reducing or increasing the number of received messages. The issue seems to be keeping information organized and quickly accessible while having an easy method to engage with the school community and contact teachers.

Mark, a father from Concord, New Hampshire, explained how his system of organizing emails can still fail him,

“I keep track of school communications through an email folder I create labeled School. This usually makes it easy to find school information quickly. One problem I have faced previously with this approach is remembering to clear out older messages so there is less clutter. Additionally, I have sometimes forgotten to move messages to the school folder. Both of these problems caused me to become frustrated later when searching the school folder only to not find what I am looking for.”

Beyond Information: Building Connection

When schools introduce a new teacher or announce a new policy, parents often respond privately, but the larger community never hears those voices. A unified platform could bring those reactions into the open, creating a sense of shared support and dialogue.

Amy, the Wisconsin parent of children with IEPs, explained why this matters:

“With my family’s busy schedule, I need to know about important meetings well in advance. If parents could also support each other on updates like this, it would make a difference.”

Parents Work Hard to Stay On Top of Messages

So, are parents overwhelmed, or do they stay on top of school communication? This is not a simple question to answer, especially considering the pre-existing parental burnout. My focus group draws a picture of competent parents willing to put time and effort into staying in sync with everything happening in school and all critical information.

A charter school parent Jadelynn, from Volcano, Hawai‘i represents this competence:

“The challenge is just keeping everything organized because there are so many updates at once, especially in the first few weeks.”

Parents go as far as taking pictures of school communication, setting special email folders for the communication with years-long archives, and setting their own personal calendars with reminders on upcoming events. All participants mentioned the use of school apps in a favorable light, but wished that the information was easier to find and that more communication would be housed in the app to avoid scattered messages across different platforms.

It’s important to note that our focus group members were interested in discussing parent communication and, therefore, likely more engaged with the school community than some other parent groups. They did not fit into a picture of a stereotypical, disengaged parent type, who do not care what’s happening in their child’s school. These parents see themselves as connected members of the school community, and while their roles may be limited to school drop-off and pick-up and homework support, their role is nevertheless critical.

The parents acknowledged that a more unified communication would be beneficial to them, yet were accepting of the multifaceted school communication style that required them to work hard with their inboxes and filing systems. In other words, the parents had relatively low expectations for acceptable school communication. (Note: Private school parents who pay tuition and younger, more digitally savvy parents may be more inclined to be critical of their child’s school’s communication.)

How A Unified Platform Such as School Signals Can Help

Lastly, let’s look into the value of School Signals in organizing communication, notifying parents, and engaging parents to become active members of the school community.

At School Signals, we listen to the parent feedback like this carefully and with great interest. We are empathetic to the parent experience that burdens parents and requires surprisingly high technical skills to stay on top of the school communication. On the other hand, we recognize that some school cultures are rooted in the traditional one-way communication style where parents are not engaged as active community members who can collectively contribute to the school culture, but rather as information recipients.

Parents shouldn’t have to rely on inbox searches, screenshots, or binders to keep track of school communication. School Signals organizes communication into proper channels and keeps a reliable digital record. Communication is searchable by audience, member who posted the communication, and by time frame.

The organization of communication blends the best parts of real-time communication feeds to purpose-built interfaces, so parents can quickly locate the needed information. Teacher introductions can live in Classroom hubs, where parents can add welcoming comments.

Activity updates, such as a basketball coach’s note or after-school sign-ups, are in Clubs & Programs hubs. Priority items, like technology policies or IEP reminders, can be flagged for urgent attention and delivered with both app notifications and text alerts.

Additionally, there are times when a collective parent voice can benefit the school culture, and those opportunities are missed when parents cannot come together to welcome a new teacher or give a shout-out on their positive experiences. Volunteering sign-ups and active parent groups are concrete ways to include parents in the school community beyond one-way communication. Parent comments can be enabled with moderation.

Thirdly, it’s clear that a school communication space calls for unification. Schools need to be able to select the right communication tools to consolidate communication and align their faculty across different departments to use the selected tools optimally. School communication platform providers must maintain the feedback loop with all users – administrators, teachers, parents, and students (in case they have access) – to meet the real-life delivery, classification, and engagement requirements for school communication.

Special Thank You!

Thank you to all parents who participated in the School Signals focus group and shared their insights and thoughts. All names, locations and quotes were used with permission from the focus group members.