August signals the beginning of school and the time to review your school’s communication plan. Communicating with parents, students, teachers and staff is a necessary job that can become time consuming and overwhelming. Choosing a comprehensive communication system that provides phone, texting and email is the first step in building an effective communication plan. Once your communication system is in place it is time to consider what type of messages you will be sending. Here are just a few of the top messages that schools send during the school year.
1. Weather Related Cancellations or Delays
These type of messages are often unplanned. Helping parents, staff, and students prepare in the event of a weather related cancellation of delay will be greatly appreciated. In addition it will ensure that everyone is informed as quickly as possible.
2. School Cancellations
Typically school cancellation notifications are from weather related issues; however, there are other instances in which school could be cancelled. For example: water or electrical outages, school safety concerns, weather damage or evacuation shelter needs are just a few of the other unplanned reasons school may be cancelled.
3. Event Reminders
Sending reminders about school events like teacher work days, parent-teacher conferences, back to school nights, graduation, award ceremonies, holiday parties and other important events increases attendance for events. Remind parents about dates, times, what to bring, what to wear and other important information.
4. Emergency and School Safety Notifications
In the event of an emergency there is no time to think about how to communicate. Schools must have a system that can quickly and easily get a message out to parents, staff and teachers. These messages will inform everyone about safety concerns and remind them how to respond during an emergency.
5. Substitute Teacher Requests
Teachers are people, too, and people get sick. When a teacher is unable to be in class, use your communication system to quickly communicate with all available substitutes, receive quick responses on availability and place substitutes.
6. Absence and Tardy Notifications
It is proven that students who attend class learn more. *eye roll* Informing parents and guardians about students who have missed classes or are tardy will help ensure that students spend as much time in class as possible.
7. Schedule Changes
There are often times when schedules overlap and the mistake wasn’t noticed till the last minute. With a communication system, you can change the date, time or location of an event or minute within seconds.
CallingPost is a great way to send all your school communications. Here are a few of the ways other schools use CallingPost for their important messages:
“I’m a 6th grade science teacher. I teach 3 different levels of science: gifted, regular ed, and special ed. With the mandates of No Child Left Behind and
Title I, we are required to contact parents weekly with student progress,
assignments, PTO, parent conference dates, tests, upcoming projects and
activities. With my gifted students, I
have to contact my parents all the time for fundraisers, study trip meetings,
grades, projects, etc. I use CallingPost
for all these needs. I record a message
and choose the parents to call and CallingPost.com does the rest. I especially like the reports I get. I can print these and turn them into the
administration each 9 week grading period to verify my parent contacts. IT IS A LIFE SAVER!!! There are never enough hours in the day but
CallingPost.com frees up my time to plan great lessons for my classes and focus
on my students’ individual needs. I’ve
recommended our PTO to use it this year for parent contacts for meetings,
events, and membership drive. It is a
fantastic tool!!”
– Patti Ward
“CallingPost always saves the day for
us!! Many times we will have last minute reminders to the next day’s
activities, changes to the time of an event or the specific parents who are
involved. Who has time to call 500
students? Let alone create a spreadsheet of who received the email? It is such a time saver. I wonder what people
did before CallingPost.”
– Deerwood Academy
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