A national survey released in October asked 1,031 K-12 parents how they hear from their schools. Email, phone calls, and text messages led the list. The school website came next: a third of parents said they use it. But when parents picked up to two channels they would most like to use, only one in ten chose the website.
That isn’t a reason to neglect the website, but a clue about what the website is for. Parents want news by text and email. They come to the website with a question: what time early dismissal is, how to register a new student, which bus stop is theirs. Nobody browses a district website for fun. They arrive with one thing to find out, often after the office has closed, often on a phone.
The survey shows what happens when that goes well. Half of parents said responses to their questions make them feel supported, as many as said so about updates on their child’s behavior and well-being. And 84 percent said the school is easy to reach with a question.
The gaps show up among families who speak Spanish at home. Compared with English-speaking parents, they were more than twice as likely to say they weren’t sure where to find important information (12 percent versus 5), about twice as likely to call important information unclear or confusing (17 versus 8), and more than three times as likely to say communication wasn’t available in their language (14 versus 4). Three in four said the school was easy to reach with a question, compared with 85 percent of English-speaking parents. The Spanish-speaking group was small, fewer than a hundred parents, so read these as a signal, not precise figures. They match what front offices hear every day.
ParentSquare commissioned the survey and Hanover Research conducted it. Its headline findings are public: 63 percent of parents said communication quality influenced their decision to stay at a school, and half said it influenced where they enrolled. The figures above come from the full report.
So the test for a district website is whether a parent with one question, in the language spoken at home, can find the answer in under a minute. Try it the way a parent would, then read what families type when they’re given a box to ask in.
AskK12 answers families’ questions from your district’s own website, in more than 25 languages, any time of day.