Are we sending too many emails from school? Today was the 3rd time I heard someone say, “I get so
many emails from my child’s school I can’t keep track.” In this case the parent has a student at multiple schools in the district. Well good grief! Your “darned” if you do and “darned” if you don’t. (School appropriate language.) Even after sending all the emails we still hear, “I didn’t know it was pajama day.”
I never thought we could over-communicate. My teachers and I pride ourselves in how much and how often we communicate with our school community. When working on my masters/specialist degrees I clearly remember one superintendent saying something like, “If you don’t tell your community the whole story they will make up the details.”
The thinking here is specifically for email. My school also manages a Twitter account, Facebook account, and Instagram account. But most people go to these locations on their own. We all live in our email so it’s not really a choice to check our email every day. We all check our email.
New thinking and questions about school email:
- Is once a week from the school office enough? I try to include all the weeks details in one email. (And on the website, and on Facebook, and…….so on. )
- Are parents more like to read an email from the school office or the teacher?
- Remind101 – my school community has really embraced this tool. But at this time only the teachers use it. Trying to decide if it should just be teachers or how often should the office use it?
- Be specific in the subject line – This is something I try really hard to do. It drives me insane when I get emails with NO SUBJECT. If your email isn’t even worthy of title then it’s not worth my time to read it. No, really, this drives me CRAZY!
- I still send paper copies and I probably always will.
- Who sends the email? – Lately I have been sending emails to my secretary to copy/paste into the parent email list. I do this so she can handle all the replies. However, in the beginning the parents may not have known who angiecurry@……….. was and deleted or didn’t read the emails. I should probably send one every now and then just as a reminder.
- Spam – Didn’t realize how much school email was going to parent spam. Not sure how to fix that one. Maybe at the beginning of the year send paper, post to Facebook, Twitter, website etc. that an email was sent and to make sure you got it.
I will still use all the communication tools available. I also think this will continue to evolve over the years and can be an ongoing conversation.
Facebook…..Blast it out! The more the better! Parents love it!
Email…..now that’s personal. Careful what you send there:)
