In three decades of directing a middle school, I have found several strategies that have helped improve school/parent relationships. Some of these may seem obvious, but I have learned that, in the frenetic pace that evolves as soon as the term begins in early fall, we sometimes overlook the obvious. Here are some suggestions:
• You cannot over-communicate policies and practices that affect families — homework rules, absence policies, reporting student progress, where kids can/cannot be after school ends, and so forth. Thus, your handbook, whether in hard-copy form or online, needs to be kept clear, current, and comprehensive. The summer hours spent in making sure that the information going home is accurate will save many hours of explaining things to individual families during the year.
• Clarify the key staff members for parents to contact in various situations (homework questions, organizational needs, social concerns). This helps parents develop greater trust in the school and distributes the responsibilities of liaising with parents among many teachers.
• Provide orientation meetings for parents prior to transition periods within the school or when introducing a new program (moving from lower to middle school, understanding the athletic program, beginning a second language, etc.). Doing this keeps surprises to a minimum. Parents often believe that practices within the school always stay the same, even when their child is moving from a self-contained classroom setting into a departmentalized structure.
• Make sure that organizational tools are supplied in order to internalize and support executive functioning skills. It’s good to provide customized assignment books for each student, provide online assignments, and make sure that a project/test calendar is available. In my school, we also provide color-coordinated three-ring binders for each subject. We have also installed an additional shelf in each student’s locker so that books and notebooks can be stored in easy-to-locate ways. Wooden coat hooks were installed in each homeroom so that the hall locker served only as a repository for academic materials.
• I have found that ongoing monthly meetings for parents of each grade-level are fantastic at helping everyone feel connected, thus leading to a “we-we” atmosphere at the school rather than the always fragile “we-they” syndrome that can result when communication breaks down. These meetings are best when (1) they are developmentally appropriate and topic driven; (2) when discussion of other children, families, and teachers is forbidden; and (3) when parents are empowered with some responsibilities for ancillary activities (such as planning all-class social events and helping set up meaningful community service programs). Best turnouts seem to occur when these meetings run from 7:45 to 8:45 or 9:00 a.m. so that working parents can attend without having to come back to school at night.
• Early in the year, each advisor should make a call home to each of her or his advisee’s families to make sure that the line of communication to the school is open.
• A weekly “in-house” report should be prepared for each student, and a rubric for this can be created online for the faculty. This is made available to the advisor who then reviews it with her or his students every week. Should trouble spots become apparent, these are communicated directly home, along with special citations for those students whose work has been especially exemplary that week. No parents should hear or see especially negative or positive news about their child for the first time in a written report.
• Parent conferences should focus on the needs of the child — on strategies going forward that can help the child be more successful. If the earlier school communication with the home has been good, these kinds of conferences can be wonderfully collaborative events.
Every school has practices that enhance good relationships among the administrators/teachers, their students, and their families. But schools also need to remain vigilant in following these practices. As any head of school can tell you, it is always better to spend a few hours of prevention at the start of the year than it is to discover in January or February that Freddy is hopelessly behind in a subject or that Suzie is miserably unhappy with her peer group — and has been for months.
When we do take the time to communicate properly, everyone benefits.