Tell me, please, about schools that handle communications with families wisely. Because I think there must be a better way.
Our district sends out automated calls to families multiple times per week. In theory, I'm on board with that. If there's a school closing or another kind of emergency, I want to know about it promptly. By all means, call all of the numbers you have on file.
Emergencies are rare, though. (Thankfully.) Unfortunately, our district handles all notifications like emergencies, blasting out information across every available channel. If there's an already-planned change to the next day's schedule -- one I put on my calendar when they told me about it last month -- I don't need to get four separate notifications about it. They call my landline (at dinnertime, natch). My cell buzzes from across the room. They call my office, even though it's 6:30 in the evening and I won't get the message until the following day, after the schedule change is in effect. And they send me an email notification for good measure.
This is excessive. Strangely, they never call my husband, even though his work number is current in their system. Is there an automated decision process somewhere, some algorithm deciding that five notifications would be a bridge too far? Or is it institutional sexism, in which the assumption is that moms handle school issues and are more likely to do work that can be interrupted?
I also get four separate notifications every time a school official wants to remind families about something. Go to the restaurant that's giving us a portion of their proceeds tonight! Come to the dance tomorrow! Wear nice clothes for pictures on Friday! Listen while I read aloud the policy on lunch accounts or tank tops or both!
I do not need four separate notifications about any of those things.
It's unlikely but not impossible that I'll take the whole family to Noodles for a school fundraiser. But I really seriously do not need four separate notifications about things that don't pertain to my family at all. The junior high vice-principal is the worst offender. The first time I got a menacing message saying, "Parents, this message is going out to families whose students have received multiple detentions this term," I was pretty alarmed. I didn't know about even one detention! What could have happened?
What happened, and what keeps happening, is that the vice-principal is having a hard time figuring out the messaging system. Instead of targeting the families whose kids have received multiple detentions, or the families whose students are actually on the delayed bus, he sends his messages out to the whole school. That's nine hundred families, each getting four notices (or more? almost all dads have cell phones, right? even though my husband is trapped in the last millennium searching fruitlessly for a pay phone?), when the target audience was a tenth or a twentieth that size.
I don't even listen when he calls these days. In fact, the district has taught me that the best use of my time is to ignore all of their calls, to assume they're calling about a minor issue that I can deal with at my convenience, or never.
It's like a newer version of a 1990s car alarm. At first we all whipped our heads around -- emergency! Then we all learned to disregard them -- even if they were telling us something worth listening to.
This fall has brought a record number of email contacts telling me that the schools are using new third-party sites which require me to sign up for effective communication with my children's teachers. Also, the teachers can choose which platform they prefer, so I'll need to check multiple platforms for optimal results. Also, Google Classroom is going to send me weekly updates that describe every assignment my seventh-grader is doing. What would my mother have done if my seventh-grade teachers had wanted her to review every assignment I did in a week, I wonder? Something emphatic, I am certain. Some days I think 1982 took place on a different planet.
I am having a wicked thought: maybe all of the frustrated Gladlyville parents could make a pact: we could filter our unwanted email notifications so that they skipped our inboxes and were forwarded to the technology-challenged vice-principal at my son's junior high. Probably then he'd be too busy with his delete key to spray out grumpy messages to the wrong audience. Win!
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