At Larned High School, communication is a key component to running the school. However, too much communication can be a bad thing. Around the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year, the high school ramped up communication levels between the school and parents. The increase in communication was meant to help keep parents informed of what their students were up to in school, and it encouraged parents to become more involved with their children’s academics, but how much communication is too much?
Before this school year, parents were informed of a few key goings on at LHS. They received a few important emails regarding their kids’ lunch balances, activities, updates, and important information regarding their schedules, such as when picture day would take place. Now that the correspondence between the school and parents has increased, parents are receiving more emails than they have time to look through. They get updates every week on what their students are doing in each of their eight classes. Parents also receive these updates through text messages and emails, so they get double the notifications. Now that parents are inundated with all of these notifications, the importance of them is lost. Parents might not read any of the notifications because they likely don’t care about what half of them say. Now, parents aren’t checking any of the announcements.
Every school day, parents entrust their children to the school. They know that their child is going to get the education they need, as is required by the state. Parents have enough work to do as it is, let alone if they are having to keep up with everything their child is doing in school for 40 hours per week. High school students should be responsible enough to not need their parents to keep track of all of their high school events.
While a few parents need to be informed about all of these things, other parents would appreciate receiving less information, in turn for only getting the crucial messages. Important information should include report cards, schedules, and lunch balances, not teacher lesson plans for the week. If parents only receive the important information, then they won’t have to worry about sorting through a dozen unnecessary emails to find the pertinent email that they need to read. Overall, LHS should do a better job with communication, and they should allow parents to choose to receive some of these emails, as opposed to overwhelming parents with too much.
