This is adapted from the revised, expanded Hopes and Fears: Strengthening the Relationship with Today’s Independent School Parents, Second Edition. It’s available in the NAIS Bookstore.
By Rob Evans and Michael ThompsonSchools wishing to reset expectations for students have found they needed to enlist parents’ support.
The most successful schools have taken a direct approach. They have carefully reviewed their students’ needs and then clearly communicated their findings and plans to parents. Typically, the head of school has sent a letter—we think of it as a “senior partner” letter—to all families, outlining concerns about students’ readiness and behavior and the risks these concerns pose to students’ academic and personal development as well as the school’s ability to fulfill its mission.
The letter typically acknowledges that the problem is national and that it stems, in good part, from the understandable exceptions that the school and parents both made as they tried to help students cope with an unprecedented pandemic. The letter offers an overview of the steps the school will be taking to foster resilience. (These essentially fall under researcher Ann Masten’s heading of “pay attention, solve problems, and control behavior,” although that’s not the language that’s used.) It asks for parents’ partnership by letting students learn from the consequences the school applies when they have trouble meeting expectations, and by other steps, such as limiting students’ social media use. And it often announces a meeting where parents can learn more and get their questions answered. (The book’s Appendix B contains a sample of such a letter.)
Because an effort to foster coping among students means clarifying limits and, at times, applying consequences, it can stir anxiety in some parents and anger in others. It makes sense to anticipate these reactions and to be ready to apply the techniques in this book’s basic and advanced toolkits. Rather than launch immediately into a defense of the school’s efforts, it is better to have a hopes and fears conversation—to ask about parents’ concerns, to ask what they hope/wish the school would do and what they fear if the school doesn’t.
Only then will it be time to restate, simply, the basics: the behaviors the school has been seeing; the risks to students of not addressing these behaviors; and the evidence that combining warmth, structure, and expectations will help students mature and develop resilience.
Hopes and Fears’ updated second edition provides empathic advice on how to improve the home-school relationship in the wake of the disruptions of the early 2020s.