Get Positive News Out To Families!

Crisis information and need-to-know alerts can dominate lines of communication between schools and families. These important missives are essential and mandatory to ensure the health and safety of the community.

However, like any relationship, dialogue should be more than one tone. To lift and facilitate deeper parent engagement, positive messaging interspersed within the flow of routine school news is a welcome solution. As schools work hard to inform parents of the essentials, what strengthens this relationship is affirmative news about their child’s successes, be they academic, behavioral, or social-emotional. It’s best delivered by real people sharing happy, hopeful moments about what happens every day in schools that parents might otherwise not know. Tell authentic, positive stories that organically happen in schools daily.

How a communications calendar can keep consistently positive communication

Organizing a positive communications strategy gives your school a powerful tool to improve parent engagement. It can lead to more personalized interactions with families. Likely, it will open opportunities for building deeper relationships. By sharing good news and actionable information, parents will feel invited and encouraged to be more active educational partners.

Fostering engagement with parents has never been as necessary to the success of education as it is now. We already know strong parent engagement leads to academic gains, improved social skills development, better attendance, and increased class participation. It can also mitigate behavioral problems. Improving parent engagement will clearly make adjusting to ongoing community issues easier for everybody.

The Snap! Connect team sends out a sample calendar to get you started with some ideas,  supporting your team, teachers, and administrators in their goals to build family engagement. Having positive communication and a positive relationship is not about doing more, or adding more work to your busy day; it is about doing things differently.

Examples of positive messaging

Positive messaging:

• Feature each student in school achievement shout-outs.
• Celebrate a student who reached an academic goal.
• Acknowledge students who have helped others.
• Message the guardians of a student who overcame an educational roadblock.
• Share a picture of a student’s successful work or presentation.
• Reach out to the family of a student who is taking steps to achieve goals set in conferences or IEP meetings.
• Show support for students who worked well together in group projects.
• Support students who have been accepted to their dream colleges.
• Send a picture of a student hard at work.

Creating family engagement depends deeply on establishing and fostering relationships; these consistent positive communications can build those. We know how busy and overloaded the school day is now more than ever. No teacher or administrator needs to be doing more, but if they can do things differently it could be better for everyone.

Snap! Connect believes that positive communication can help you actively engage with parents. Snap! Connect’s communication hub connects everyone in the school district — administrators, teachers, parents, and students.

Contact us today to learn how we can help bring good news to your community.