When you study education in college, they tell you how important communicating with parents and engaging the community is.
As a wide-eyed young teacher, you come in fired up to not only impact students but also families.
After a few long days of teaching, planning, grading, fire drills, infrastructure tests, technology mishaps, breaking up fights, crying and/or screaming students… the motivation to call parents diminishes quickly.
Has this happened to you?
As a high school teacher with 140-240 students at all times, it felt impossible to keep up with parents. Phone calls were only made when dire emergencies or extremely critical behavior issues arose.
No answer, voicemails, talkative grandparents, and incorrect, disconnected, or outdated phone numbers made the process even worse.
You can imagine how I felt when I switched to middle school and had the largest class sizes I’d ever had. Then, the principal informed staff we were required to call the parent each and every time a student was late. I ran some numbers in my head. 20-40 students late per day x 5 minutes per phone call. Not including behavior and academic issues.
I need to stay after school calling parents for 2-3 hours per day? This didn’t make sense to me. That is valuable time I could spend planning, grading, coming up with creative ideas for class, reaching out to the community for classroom support, activities, or field trips. Not to mention resting, something teachers don’t get to do.
There had to be a better way.
Even in pre-ChatGPT days, I knew there had to be a website or something that would automate this process for me. After some searching, I found two great options!
I began using a free Google Voice number to text parents individually. I could create a template and simply copy/paste the texts to inform parents of their tardy child (or other behavioral/academic issues).
Then, I found Call-em-All (now called Text-em-All). I could record my voice… “Good afternoon, this is Mr. Johnson calling from Carver Middle School. I’m calling to inform you your child was tardy to class today. If you have any questions or concerns, please call the main office to set up a parent conference.”
I imported the contacts, and BINGO. 40 prerecorded voice messages sent out in seconds.
Students came in apologizing, parents set up parent conferences. A student even told me I called her mom and she was trying to talk to me. I had to let her know it was a recording (I guess it sounded pretty good!)
All that to say, after about 30 minutes of time invested in getting set up on these pages, I could communicate with more parents in less time. In fact, I probably spent the least amount of time on parent communication among the teachers, but communicated with the most parents. In less than 3 minutes a day, I could be in touch with 40 parents.
Will this work for you? Maybe, maybe not. But the idea of figuring out an outside-the-box alternative to age-old education problems: that’s a mindset we all need.
Cheers to great parent communication and getting your time back!