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Can you point to that moment where a teacher said or did something that changed the course of your life? I certainly can. In my case, it wasn’t what the teacher said to me. It was what she said to my mother.
The reason I even graduated from high school was because my mom ran into my English teacher at the grocery store when I was in 10th grade, and the teacher mentioned that I’d missed class–a lot, actually. That chance encounter saved me from dropping out.
My mom also happened to be a teacher, so you better believe I started showing up to school daily and made up for the work I’d missed. But what I learned from that moment was how important it is to keep families looped into what’s really happening with their kids at school. Because left in the dark, even the most well-intentioned parents can’t step in to course-correct before it’s too late. I became determined to bridge that communication gap between schools and home.
I started down that path as the youngest school technology director in my home state of Mississippi’s history. But I quickly learned that one-size-fits-all methods didn’t even come close to getting the job done. The tool we needed didn’t exist. For true engagement, we needed two-way communication: conversations based on data, in languages families understand, and tailored to each child’s needs.
I started my journey with that vision of seamless school-home communication. And more than a decade later, I’m still on a mission to empower families with insights and open doors for supportive interventions and greater collaboration between families, teachers, and administrators.
This past winter, my team was laser-focused on integrating six different companies into one cohesive set of solutions to better tackle some of the monumental struggles schools are experiencin–like chronic absenteeism. In the midst of this, I had my daughter’s parent-teacher conference. I am that parent who’s guilty of missing information in the firehose of communications that come home from school because they are often school-wide announcements and rarely have anything to do with my specific child. But the parent conference was solely about my kid and had my full attention.
If those high-value touchpoints are so meaningful for me, I knew they had to be for families across the board. We couldn’t just develop “the next great thing” without understanding families’ true needs and perspectives. That’s why I was determined to put families’ perspectives front and center. To truly empower productive school-home partnerships, we needed to go straight to the source–caregivers raising our nation’s students.
We’re continuously striving to improve and to help inform our ongoing evolution, we launched a survey. The 2024 K-12 Family Communication Survey aimed to gather insights from U.S. families and caregivers of K-12 children. The final survey results included more than 1,000 responses. And the results were stunning. The data shows just how much families crave a deeper level of transparency and collaboration.
Here is one of the starkest findings: More than 78 percent of families reported that they don’t receive suggestions and resources for how they can support learning at home, with middle and high school families reporting they receive even less regular communication on supporting student success. We also learned that45 percent of all families only receive communications after a student is already absent. We know educators are overwhelmed and schools are being asked to do more with less. Over the last decade we’ve seen time and again that in order to make a real impact on chronic absenteeism, schools need to be leading with proactive, positive communication. Families agree–71 percent shared they think positive updates celebrating good attendance would be helpful.
Perhaps most critically, for multilingual families, the struggle is even more pronounced. While 70 percent of multilingual respondents prefer to receive text messages about their child, over one-third have trouble with the information coming home from school due to language barriers. This cuts families off from insights critical to engagement.
It’s clear the status quo is still leaving many families in the dark. And I can’t accept that. It’s on all of us to reimagine school-home communication through a modern, family-friendly lens. The bottom line is this: Every student has both a teacher and family member out there who will advocate for them. My goal is to put a tool in their hand that will let them do so.
