New Teacher Parent Communication Plan

How to Communicate Effectively With Your Parent Population

The goal for this school year is work smarter not harder and in regard to communication with your parent population, if you can do a few things consistently your will have a much easier school year. To communicate effectively, ninety-five percent of your communication should be done proactively and the remaining five percent should be done reactively.  This document will be a guide for you in how to categorize each of those forms of communication and how to utilize them over the course of the school year. 

Proactive Communication

·      Weekly Email or Post

A proactive weekly email or post on google classroom is critical to establishing rapport with your parent population.  Try to send out the email at the same time each week and include important weekly information, upcoming dates on the calendar and few celebrations from the week.  It does not have to be lengthy but is should be consistent. 

·      Updating Grades and Academic Information

All academic and character information should be communicated to families through our online Learning Management System called Infinite Campus.  If you need more information on how to post grades on academic or character along with comments for each student click here. 

·       Behavior Charts and Academic Contracts

In the event that you have one of those tricky students that is distributive to other students during learning time, has difficulty completing assignments, or just generally needs to be held accountable for their actions it is important that you meet with the parents in the first six weeks of the school year and establish a daily behavior contract or academic contract with the family and create the expectation that this document is reviewed and discussed after each school day.

·       Sign-Ups for Student-Led Conferences and Volunteering

It is important that we try to give our parents as much advance notice about dates for conferences, crew trips, and volunteer opportunities.  Our school uses the free resource, SignUpGenius, for all communication for conference and volunteering opportunity.  The expectation is to send out a link to a SignUpGenius at least three weeks before a conference or any other event.  The earlier you send it out the better.

Reactive Communication

·      Pick Up the Phone

More often than not, if you are dealing with reactive communication it is because a student made a mistake in some way.  Email and text-messages can often be misunderstood or hard to communicate, it is always best to first pick up the phone and have a conversation with the parent. 

·      Flip the Script with your Phone Calls

Try to carve out five or ten minutes in your day to call a few parents and share a celebration or some good news with parents.  A good ratio to work towards is try to make three positive phone calls to every one negative that you have to make.  This will go a long way with your parent population especially in the event that you might have to make a negative call later in the year.

·      Schedule a Meeting

There are some instances where phone or email is just not enough and you need to meet in person.  A member of the admin team is always willing to sit in on a meeting you and the parents you wish to communicate with.  This is usually a good idea if you want to create a behavior or academic contract, are concern about a student’s academics, social and emotional health, or general well-being. 

For most of your parent population, establishing a routine of weekly communication will proactively meet their needs.  Try to stay ahead of your communication and stay consistent with how often you communicate and when you communicate.   If you over communicate, you risk that your communications will not be read, if you under communicate, you risk having to be much more reactive throughout the course of the year.  Using this weekly proactive approach will help you the families you serve stay up to date with everything they need to know as the school year rolls by.  If our whole team can follow these basic communication rules with fidelity we should have a more effective and easier year. 

Multi-Agency Agenda

Today’s meeting will take place from 3:30-4:15 and discuss three essential resources for your student and family.  I will take approximately ten minutes to discuss potential resources and partnerships in multi-agency planning, school health, and strategies for case planning in regard to your student’s unique needs.  The remaining fifteen minutes will be left for questions and answers from the team. 

Multi-Agency Planning

             It is important to make sure that the following questions have been answered before or after the meeting takes place.  The teacher and team should have observed the student and can answer these questions:

• Why do I think a meeting is required? What is the purpose? What’s to be gained?
• Have I discussed the need for a meeting with parents and child/ young person, and explained my assessment and analysis of the situation to them?
• Have I obtained explicit consent to information sharing from parents and child /young person (dependent on age and level of understanding)?
• Have I explained who will be present at the meeting?
• Considering everyone’s needs- where is the best place to hold the meeting?
• How will I support and enable parents to express their views and wishes or have them represented?
• How will I support the child /young person to express their views and wishes or have them represented?
• If parents or child /young person choose not to attend, who will represent their view?
• Is there someone in the family network of support who the family would wish to attend for support at the meeting?

School Health

·       Vision, hearing and dental screening that each child receives twice a year.

·       Nurse four days a week and on site.

·       School psychologist four days a week on site. 

·       Social and Emotional Curriculum taught K-5 once a week

Family and Social Strategies in Case Planning

·       Special Education Coordinator will schedule a meeting with our team to sign paperwork

o   Establish IEP or Tier Two Intervention services

o   Additional Diagnostic Assessments to be performed by both the Classroom Teacher and our Special Education Teacher-Woodcock Johnson, Orton Gillingham, AIMSWeb, DRA2, additional oral reading fluency and math screeners

o   Behavioral Evaluation from our Psychology Team-both in class and at recess

·       Local Free Medical Resources offer through Aurora Family Health

o   Visit a Pediatrician

o   Flu Shots

o   Therapy Sessions

·       Private and Affordable tutoring??

·       Additional Homework Suggestions from Classroom Teacher

Questions, Concerns, and Comments

References

Multi-Agency Planning. (n.d.). Retrieved November 10, 2019, from http://www.moray.gov.uk/moray_standard/page_79759.html.

"New to our School?" Family Orientation Guide

Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning

1700 N. Holly Street, Denver, CO 80222

303 759-2076

dsheldon@rmsel.org

www.rmsel.org

Dear Recipient,

Congratulations on your lottery selection and admission to Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning.  We are excited for your student and family to join our crew.  Our school is proud to be considered the first expeditionary learning school in the country and is currently in our 26^th year of existence.  We are inspired by the concept of outward bound and teach project based learning rather than a traditional curriculum.  There are a few nuts and bolts of our unique school that we would like you to consider prior to your student’s first day of school.

Home Visits and Crew Meet Ups

              RMSEL Crew Leaders conduct home visits so in a few short weeks you should receive a welcome letter from your crew leader along with a link to a Sign-Up Genius form.  Your new Crew Leader would like to visit your student at your home and take about fifteen minutes to get to know and connect with your son or daughter.  There is nothing that needs to be prepared or done, just please sign-up for a time that is conveienant for you and your student.  In addition, all elementary school classrooms offer a Crew Meet Up before the school year begins just to connect with other students in the crew and spend more time getting to know their crew leader.  This is completely optional and are just for you and your family to connect with your new community.  Some are scheduled in a park near school, others at the playground our in your classroom.  The time, date and location of the Crew Meet Up will be sent out in your Crew Leader’s welcome letter. 

Field Work, Crew Trips, and Calendar

Students at our school participate in over-night camping trips starting in kindergarten with an one night overnight in a cabin all the way up to high school were they participate in a three week traditional outward bound experience including a solo.  This is a special part of the RMSEL experience and we are grateful to have our students be able to connect outside of the classroom and make their standards come to life in a very authentic way.  Further, each crew

has a specific day of the week (this will be communicated by your Crew Leader) in which we will take our buses out in the field to conduct fieldwork.  We have a busy crew trip season in addition to all the other wonderful events happening at our school please click here to get access to our full calendar for the school year.  

Forms for Parents

              As a result of all the wonderful adventures that students get to participate in at our school we have a myriad of liability forms, medical forms, and other miscellaneous forms that must be filled out for our crews to be safe out in the field.  Please click here to access electronic versions of all or the necessary parental forms to be completed.

Ground School for Parent Volunteers

              Before the school year starts, our adventure coordinators Andy and Tara hold a Ground School for parents which is a half day course on basic wilderness first aid, getting bus driver certified and general logistics of helping with a crew trip.  Please look out for an email from our adventure team in the upcoming weeks inviting you to attend one of three ground school trainings offered throughout the year.  If you want to volunteer and chaperone on a crew trip or field work, attending Ground School is highly recommended.

Crew Leader Welcome Letters and Supply Lists

              Each Crew Leader Crew Leader at our school creates a summer letter and supply list outlining what each crew will be learning, where the crew trips will take place, and any supplies a student may need to be successful from a pencil and composition notebook, to a sleeping bag and waterproof rain pants.  Please reference the letters, supply lists and continuum of community structures for each respective grade level here. 

Welcome to our RMSEL community.  You should look forward to a communication from your crew parent along with your crew leader in the next few weeks.  If you are interested in being part of our DAC (District Accountability Committee), please reach out to our President, Margaret Biermann at dac@rmsel.org .    If you have any questions or concerns in the interim feel free to reach out to me as I would be happy to answer them for you.  I speak on behalf of our whole RMSEL staff when I say, we look forward to partnering in you and your student to become both and expeditionary and life-long learner.   

Warm regards,

David Sheldon

PTA Activity Planning Guide

Community Gathering

            The school believes it is important to demonstrate a strong community that cares for and cultivate strong life-long learners.  In particular, this community gathering will focus on gaining awareness for how the plants that we grow in our community can provide help create a healthy diet for our community.  In addition to help bring the second and third grade curriculum to life, these vegetables can be washed, prepared and transferred to the salad bar at our school cafeteria.  The purpose of this festival is to cultivate the idea in our student that the food we grow in our garden ends up in our school’s lunch table. 

DAC Supervision and Execution

              For the planning of this event, I would ask the DAC (District Accountability Committee), who is the school’s parent group that plans fundraisers and other events, to be in charge of planning and supervising this event.  This parent group holds monthly meetings with the administrative team and teacher leaders.  At a minimum of two months prior to the Fall Harvest Party, I would explain the purpose of gathering the community together and ask this groups to plan and host this event.    I think this event is important for the DAC for many reasons.  First off, it gives our students and parent population awareness around who is on the DAC and what they do.  This event can be there forum.  It is also a great place to recruit new members or family members that want to volunteer and get involved in the school.  Lastly, this is a place to raise some funds for student government to complete some service learning opportunities throughout the year.  The DAC will be put in communication with the gardening committee to organize and plan the event further.  The second and third grade classrooms take care of and manage the garden and they currently work with the garden committee to grown vegetables and keep the space thriving and healthy.  The garden committee will help families harvest vegetables from the garden and make healthy dishes for the community to sample at the party. 

Gardening Committee

              This is a group of second and third grade teachers, parents and community volunteers whose mission it is to connect the second and third grade curriculum of the study of botany and plants into an authentic connection with the food they eat.  This year’s harvest party will attempt to raise money and awareness to keep our schools community garden surviving and thriving.  The main objective of the group is to organize a shared watering schedule over the summer months when school is not in session.  The hope for fall party is to procure a few hundred dollars for plant starters, seeds, and fresh topsoil for the garden. 

Operational Factors

              The garden committee and DAC should plan to have at least 8 tables for stations to be set up outside near the playground and field by the school.  If the weather is below twenty degrees or otherwise inclement we will have the tables set up in the gym and we would cancel the 5k and only hold the 1 mile and 100 yard dash in the gym along with tug of war.  We will need the support of the entire administration team, DAC, the Garden Committee, and the Elementary School Teachers to stay until 7:00 pm.  Pizza will be ordered for everyone who is helping to set up, break down and facilitate the event. 

Activities

              The garden committee will plan and organize six of the ten stations at this event.  They will be seasonal vegetables that are cooked or prepared into healthy recipes for tasting stations.  The garden committee will run the following tasting stations:

1.      Multi-Color Corn Salsa (green peppers, jalapenos, onions, salt, cilantro) with yellow corn chips.

2.      Lavender Infused Lemonade

3.      Pumpkin soup

4.      Spaghetti Squash Pasta (with butter and parmesan)

5.      Simple Garden Salad (greens, green beans, cherry tomatoes, pumpkin seeds)

6.      Edible Flowers tasting (pansies from the garden will be lightly dressed with salad dressing)

There will be a few fitness events that will also take place at the fall festival.  Most notably a 5k run walk even to raise money for the garden.  In addition there will be these fitness activities:

1.      5K Run/Walk Family Event

2.      1 Mile Run/Walk Family Event

3.      100 yard field dash

4.      Tug of War Students versus Adults

Finally, there will be a literacy station that teachers will occupy with examples of grade appropriate books, oral reading fluency practice sheets, sight word flash cards, and comprehension strategies. On member of the administrative team will be at this booth at all times to help support teachers.  There will also be a leaf rubbing station with crayons, white paper and leaves collected by students.

1.      Literacy Station

2.      Leaf Rubbing Crafts

Expectations for a K-12 Electronic Communication Plan

The electronic communication plan is a document that can be referenced at any time by students, staff, or the public.  It is posted externally on our school’s website under the BOCES policies.  The document is entitled the Student Use of the Internet and Electronic Communications.  This five page student policy explains our the expectations around blocking or filtering obscene or harmful content, privacy, unauthorized and unacceptable uses, security, safety, vandalism, unauthorized content, assigning student projects and monitoring student use, student use is a privilege, and that the school or district makes no warranties.  It is a thorough document explaining precisely what content is and is not appropriate.  Further, my school is proud to participate in the Yondr movement of locking up cell phones during the school day with small bags and locking stations.  I believe that our school uses technology in the right way to help students learn, communicate and build twenty-first century skills. 

              Our communication plan views electronic communication as very positive way.  The addition of a few simply policies and structures allow students to use the internet and electronic communication as a tool to further their educational pursuits.    Here is an excerpt from our JS document or Student Use of the Internet and Electronic Communications plan:

Use of the Internet and electronic communications requires students to think critically, analyze information, write clearly, use problem-solving skills and hone computer and research skills that employers demand. Use of these tools also encourages an attitude of lifelong learning and offers an opportunity for students to participate in distance learning activities, ask questions of and consult with experts, communicate with other students and individuals and locate material to meet educational and personal information needs. (JS, accessed on 10/20/2019). 

RMSEL embraces the use of electronic communication and the internet and tries to foster a love of life-long learning through this powerful and fluid technological advancement.

Our school has traditionally not embraced social media as a communication tool in any way.  We primarily use email, google classroom, and infinite campus (a leaning management system operated by Denver Public Schools to track metrics like grades, attendance, etc.) to communicate with students and families.  However, recently our enrollment numbers in the high school are low (only sixty-one students out of a possible one hundred students) and our leadership team met and decided to create an Instagram account with two purposes.  First, we wanted to tell the unique story of our school and link it back to a podcast that small amount of high schools students created during an elective with their math teacher and secondly to recruit and retain more high school students. 

Our leadership team, which I sit on along with three other teachers at our school, debated and eventually settled on using Instagram as a way to share the story of our by letting each class own the account and use it to post information for one week each year.  My executive director recently sent this message out to our community on October 8^th. 

Over the years our families have come to learn about our schools philosophy regarding Social Media. As an organization we have also surveyed parents and found that approximately half of our parent community actively use social media to access information. We have refrained from the use of social media in past years as countless research articles and studies have been conducted describing the negative effects on socialization and child development, in short we felt that it was not our place to be active with social media while at the same time telling our students that they should refrain from use.  I will personally share that this is a “blind spot” for me as a leader because I refrain from the use of social media.

Yesterday, our Leadership Team convened consisting of our administrators, instructional coaches, and teacher leaders, one item on the agenda was “Social Media.” At RMSEL, we have so much to share that is happening every day, in classrooms, the field, fitness, crew trips, etc. Social Media is an additional platform to share these celebrations with a broader audience. The team reviewed all major platforms and felt that if we are to establish a social media platform that Instagram best aligns with our mission and vision. The team agreed that Facebook and Twitter lean toward a negative connotation and construct for more interaction, which is not our purpose for use. We want to share with our local community celebrations of learning from our amazing school and the team felt that this would be best done through Instagram. In the spirit of shared decision making and collaboration the team also would like to use this as an opportunity to learn safe digital practices for students. Our platform will be managed by the administration but operated by a different crew each week. Each crew will be responsible for taking photographs and posting messages that celebrate learning across our K-12 community. The students will schedule the posts and they will be reviewed by administration prior to posting. This shared ownership provides students with the responsibility of content creation. The official school account can be found at (rmsel_denver)!

We will ensure the integrity of parent request regarding media usage and no child with media exemptions will be included in any post. Also, the comment feature will not be active as this is a tool to share a message from the school not a place for digital conversation.  (Burns, 2019)

This new communication tool will forever change the electronic footprint of our school.  We were traditionally a school that really only viewed electronic communication and the internet as a tool for learning and collaborating and only recently have we decided to use it as a tool to share our story with world and try to recruit more high school students.    For a school that spending much more time purposefully disconnecting to the internet, computers and cell phones, I believe we are going to face a steep learning curve in the next few months in implementing our new social media program.  Our school, like our students, must continue to evolve and learn and grow with the electronic communication tools that have been created around us.

Appendix

Student Use of the Internet and Electronic Communication Document for RMSEL: http://www.rmsel.org/documents/BOCES/J%20Policy%20Revisions%202017/JS-StudentUseoftheInternetandElectronicCommunication.pdf

References

Burns, Chad.  Executive Director of Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning.   Community Communication. October 8^th, 2019.

How it Works. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2019, from https://www.overyondr.com/howitworks.

Parental Involvement Plan

Area 1: Parent Support for Classroom Instruction
          My school has a couple of different ways we involve parents at our school for additional help.  First of all, we are an Expeditionary Learning School and we participate in fieldwork almost every week are always looking for adult chaperones to meet our ratio numbers of one adult to every eight students in elementary school.  Further, each class plans to crew trips in the fall and the spring where students go camping overnight, participate in some sort of adventure, and hopefully tie their experience to what they are learning about in science or social studies.  We always need extra parental involvement from attending the crew trip, helping with gear check before we leave, organizing and preparing meals for all the adult chaperones that go along with students.  We also have many sign-up genius’ created for helping out in the classroom to stuff a Friday Folder with homework, help in a small reading group, or play with students on a Friday afternoon during choice time.  If parents have the time to devout to helping their students in the classroom during school hours, there are a myriad of choices available to them. 

Area 2: Parent Meetings, Conferences, and Activities
        Our school just completed our first of two student-led conferences that we offer at our school.  Our fall conference is called a Goal-Setting Conference, and the spring is a more of a celebration of work.  We also offer a passage-ready conference for those student that might not have completed their passage portfolio (see below in Parent Volunteer Opportunities).  What is great for teacher, but tricky for parents is that we hold these conferences during the school day and parents have to take off work to attend.  We will have no school for two days and hold conferences between the hours of 7:30-4:30.   These conferences are an amazing part of the school where students should independence in being the leaders of their own learning and will explain their goals, passions, and share some high quality work with their family.  From a teacher’s perspective, these conferences are always a wonderful way for me to reflect and reset as I sit back in awe of all the wonderful accomplishments my students have made since the start of the year. 

Area 3: Parent Volunteer Opportunities
Aside from helping out on fieldwork, crew trips, and in the classroom with various tasks, our largest parent volunteer opportunity comes at the end of the school year.  RMSEL is unique in that we have students in passage years (3^rd, 5^th, 8^th, 10^th, 12^th) will present a portfolio of their work to a panel of teacher and parent volunteers in order to pass on to the next grade.  The passage process has two days.  One is a reading day where volunteers come to the school, and read three to five portfolios and give feedback to the student in the form of a letter and sticky notes in their portfolio.  The second day is a presentation day (typically scheduled about one week to ten days later) where students present their portfolio to the panel, explain what they have changed and why they deserve to move on to the next grade.  It is a huge commitment for both the school and parent volunteers.  The reading day is typically all day (7:30-5:30) on a Saturday in May and then a few hours on a Tuesday or Wednesday in June.  It is a powerful and inspiring process to participate in and most parents who agree with the mission and vision of our school love digging in and helping students rise to meet their full potential. 

Area 4: School-Parent Compact
In reviewing the sample School-Parent Compact template provided, I believe that our school should work with our leadership team to create something like this to dissipate some of the animosity occurring at our school around their lack of input in the decision making of our school.  I think that our Executive Director would be against putting something formal in writing like this that our school would have to adhere to, however, I think that he might not have a choice.  I think it is smarter to be proactive about parental involvement and create something like this that you can control and manage rather than reactively having to defend your actions to the board after some complaints have been brought to their attention.  

Area 5: Parental Involvement in Decision-Making
        This is a huge growth area for my school.  My executive director is currently under quite a bit of scrutiny about this issue at our school.  Our PAC (Parent Action Committee) was dissolved or merged with our DAC (District Accountability Committee) and we really have no place for parents have any input in the school or decision making.  We currently have three parents that are part of DAC and they are hand-selected by our Executive Director and our President of DAC, who has been the president for the last seven years.  I am aware of nine different letters that parents have sent to our school board as a formal complaint about how this structure needs to change if parents will have more of a voice in the decisions our school makes.

        I think that DAC needs to be an open meeting for the public and recruit and include any parent that is interested in participating.  If a parent attends several meeting and shows an interest, they should be invited to become a parent-leader at the school and given an initiative like a fund-raiser for the school, or helping organize a service learning project for students. 

Area 6: Parent Resources
        Parent resources at our school vary from guides on how to access the learning management system we input grades, to a gear list for crew trips, to information on how to help your student in literacy and math.  We also have a parent network of Crew Mom’s that organize monthly activities for students outside of school, sign-ups for conferences and volunteering and activities during some of the fun days like Halloween, Valentine’s Day, etc.  Our Crew Moms are our parent leaders and act as resources for all other parents at the school.  Our President of DAC takes on the ownership to train and mentor new parents in the role of Crew Mom (or Dad-we have never had one) into all the responsibilities and best communication strategies. 

Area 7: Parent Interest Survey
        A parent survey is another growth area for our school.  This is not something that we have done in the past, however, I think it is a wonderful idea as another platform to give parents a voice at our school.  I can foresee a simple google survey or survey monkey created as an initial data point to understand what parents hopes and needs are from the school.  I know many districts like DPS require this and also give student surveys once a year.  I believe this is best practice and something that our school should adopt as well. 

How Administrators Can Use Blogs as a Communication Tool

     In the twenty-first century communication takes a lot of forms.  This is particularly apparent when you are an  administrator in a public school in America.  In an egalitarian fashion, school leaders must communicate effectively with the full spectrum of their community ranging from Grandmother's who read a paper copy of a printed out newsletter in their student's Friday Folder to the hipster millennial parent who wants all their communication to fit neatly into the latest version of their smartphone. 
     A smart school leader will leverage both paper-based communication and blogging to activate their community on a consistent basis.  It may be a lot of front-loading and work in the beginning of the year to get every media outlet active from twitter, to Instagram, to a blog, or simple email or printed out newsletter, however, the administrator will truly reap what they sow.   If a school leader is successful at implementing all of these communication outlets then he or she can not only create an audience but an active community that they can tap into if the need arises. 
    Further, communication can get so confusing at a school and if an administrator can one website with a weekly update through a blog that could be printed out and sent home to families without access to technology, the school could have one place for parents to get all the information they need.  The streamline of communication will please the population that reads it and potentially create a larger readership.