For at least the past 2 decades of my 3-decade career as an educator “parental involvement” has been highly regarded as one of the essential elements of a student’s successful sojourn through his or her K – 12 school experience. While serving as principal of K-6 and K-8 schools, I found it necessary to establish a school team comprised of teachers, school-support personnel, and parents to develop a mission statement that would include a definitive statement that focused on engaging parents in their child’s education, specifically, and the school’s mission, generally. In carrying out the mission to engage parents we strove to be as creative as possible, given our understanding of the community. It was no problem to get the majority of parents involved when it came to curriculum nights, performances, science fairs, and parent/teacher conferences, but it was extremely challenging to assist the majority of parents to consistently follow-through on the time-sensitive responsibilities of submitting documents; and, fundamentally important, creating a convenient and reliable means of communicating with the teacher or administration regarding many of the important events and processes that require parent acknowledgement, feedback, attendance, and/or approval.
Although our mission statement had great intentions to achieve optimum parental involvement, still we were unable to think of a single solution that would tie-in our fragmented, multifarious operations that would make it easy for parents to fulfill their responsibilities when called to do so and make the parent-service obligations of staff less burdensome.
SchoolLinks provides a powerful solution to the age-old occupational hazards in schools of communication slippage and operational fragmentation that creates more work, less efficiency, and sporadic connectivity to the community it serves.
~ Dr. Paul B. Mohr, Jr.
Paul B Mohr Jr 