Summer: The time of year when students busily perfect their pool handstands and teachers and school administrators plan, prepare, organize, update, and clean to get ready for the upcoming school year.
Because school teams and parents are on two completely different wavelengths when it comes to summer, it’s no surprise that the lines of communication tend to become dusty with cobwebs.
Unfortunately, your communication with parents shouldn’t stop just because school’s out.
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Why Is It so Important to Stay in Touch?
First, let’s consider why it’s so important to communicate with parents even when school is not in session.
1. Communication Should Always Be Open and Active
You’ve probably heard of the old saying out of sight, out of mind and this is exactly what happens during the summer months if you don’t keep in touch with parents.
While they’re busy shuffling their kids to camp and weekend visits to the beach, they’re not going to have time to check in with your school website. This means important updates and approaching deadlines may go unnoticed.
That’s why it’s crucial to keep your communication efforts active throughout the year.
When you consistently send parents updates, they’ll be kept in the loop without having to do the extra leg work, which means they’ll be more likely to stay informed.
2. This Cuts Down on Bombarding Parents During the First Week of School
The beginning of the school year is a hectic time for parents, teachers, and administrative staff alike.
But this doesn’t have to be the case.
Remember when we talked about how to streamline your enrollment process in this article? When you combine that approach with keeping in touch during the summer, you’ll already be two steps ahead of making the start of the school year less chaotic and more efficient.
When you send your parents updates consistently, they won’t feel as bombarded and overwhelmed at the beginning of the school year.
And we all know what happens when parents are overwhelmed right from the start: forms are lost or handed in way past their deadline and everyone is stuck playing catch up as a result.
Instead, routine updates give parents a manageable task they can tackle each week at a time, making them much more likely to complete them on time.
3. Helps Your Team Communicate Consistently
This may sound confusing at first, but communicating consistently will help your team communicate consistently throughout the year.
Hear me out.
See, communicating regularly is not always easy for many schools. Between busy times of the year like statewide testing days and holidays, missed updates are far too common.
As a result, many of the updates are jam packed with information—which can sometimes be an overwhelming amount for parents.
When your team learns how to communicate consistently, you can send little bites of information instead of massive updates.
Now, in order to get to this point, you need to establish the habit of sending your parents consistent updates. And the only way to do this is by communicating regularly.
Once you get in the routine of sending an update every week or every other week and you stick to this schedule, you’ll build the habit of keeping in touch naturally.
When your parents get on this routine, they’ll know to be on the lookout for your next update. Now things are less likely to fall through the cracks.
The key is to create a routine and stick to it. This routine shouldn’t change based on the time of year. Once the habit is formed, you’ll have no problem keeping up.
Send These Updates During the Summer Months
To give you some ideas, here are a few examples of what you’ll want to send to parents when school’s out.
1. Upcoming Events
If your school is hosting summer camps or activities, tours of the school, carnivals, etc., send out a few reminders before the date approaches so busy parents don’t miss the opportunity to have fun.
2. What to Expect During Back-to-School
To keep the start of the school year moving smoothly, send out an update to parents outlining what they can expect during back-to-school.
Explain your back-to-school procedures early on so if parents have questions they can ask them before the year starts. FAQs such as pickup and drop-off locations, as well as the bus schedule or lunch program, are helpful to include here.
You can also attach forms or links to forms that need to be filled out, as well as highlight the deadlines of when these papers are due.
A school supplies list is also a great thing to add to an update like this.
3. Important Milestones
Think about sending a separate update with dates and information regarding important milestones for the school year during the summer months.
Essentially, parents can flag this one email—per your helpful instructions within the email—so they can always refer back to it if they have any questions.
Try to include as many helpful links with these milestones as you can.
For example, if registration is due on August 1st, put this date in bold and have a link to the form in parentheses right next to it (like this). This makes it easy for parents to accomplish what needs to be done without having to spend too much time on the task.
4. General Updates & Friendly Reminders
Finally, general (and fun!) updates are always a good way to keep things light while still staying in touch.
Share interesting or informative articles, tips for keeping kids active and safe when the temperatures rise, or even just friendly reminders such as keeping up with the summer reading requirements.
These updates should be short and sweet and shouldn’t take up too much of your parents’ time. Be warned: If they take too long to read, don’t expect parents to have time for them.
Remember, you don’t want to send too many of these updates or parents will begin to lose interest. Instead, use these as a way to break up the important updates.
Schedule Your Email Updates Ahead of Time
Once your team and your teachers have an idea of what updates they’ll be sending during the summer months, your team can coordinate and schedule your communications accordingly.
You don’t want to send one update from the school and another one from a teacher back-to-back. Instead, you’ll want to space these out so that only one (or two max) launches each week. If you have to send more than these updates, you’ll need to space them out with a day or two in between.
You also don’t want to share the same information twice, which is why your team needs to come together to brainstorm these communications.
Make a simple schedule template so each person knows when their updates will be sent. For example, you could have your teachers send an update every other week while your administrative team sends one out on the weeks in between those. Both your teachers and admin team would prepare two updates per month.
Since many families travel during the summer, avoid sending out your updates on Mondays and Fridays, as these tend to be the busiest days for catching up or leaving town. Stick with the middle of the week. If you need to send two updates, shoot for a Tuesday and Thursday launch.
To save time, you can schedule these updates to launch on a future date. Your teachers and admin team can spend a few hours creating all of the posts for the summer and set them to launch later in one sitting. This saves time while still keeping things consistent.
Now that you know just how important it is to stay in touch with parents, it’s time to get moving. You can start opening the lines of communication at any point during the summer.
Begin by brainstorming ideas or a rough outline of what updates you’ll send. After that, fill in a schedule with the exact messages your team will be sending each week.
Don’t forget to make a master update with back-to-school procedures and important milestones and deadlines for parents to add to their schedules.
The key is to keep things consistent. Updating your parents regularly keeps them in the loop effortlessly.
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