Your Parents Aren’t Ignoring You. They’re Drowning.

Over the past weekend, this story from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation came across my feed. As a dad of three with children spread across two schools, I understand his frustration.

A father in Montreal recently did the math on the emails his children’s school sent him over a single school year. Read end-to-end at a normal reading pace, it would have taken him 14 hours. Two full working days — just to read what the school sent home.

He wasn’t complaining that the school was disorganized. He was complaining that it was thorough. Every teacher, every coach, every committee, every room parent, every fundraising chair — all of them communicating diligently, all of them individually reasonable, and all of them landing in the same inbox.

Over the last month, I’ve received a lot of school-related emails; some I read, others I’ve ignored, only to get another email reminding me to verify information in the SIS. This year, all the school clubs and sports have been consolidated into one app. I coach my son’s high school golf team, so I had to start using it. I’ve added my daughter’s teams to it. Then my son’s scout troop decided to use a different app. Not going to download that one.

The research backs up what that dad found. In a 2024 Yahoo/Censuswide survey of more than 2,000 parents:

• 62% admitted missing an important event or detail buried in their inbox
• 56% said they simply receive too many emails
• The average parent is sitting on as many as 2,000 unread messages at any given time
• 71% said they felt like a bad parent when they missed something important
• 37% say email interferes with quality family time

That last number is the one that should stop us. Parents aren’t apathetic. They’re overwhelmed — and they feel guilty about it. I presented a version of this process at the ISPD 2025 Summer Development School and have updated it.

Your families aren’t ignoring your messages. They’re triaging them.

The Trap Schools Fall Into

Here’s where it gets complicated for those of us in school leadership.

In ISPD’s school assessment work, we ask every constituency the same question: “How well does the school communicate with its various groups?” The answers cluster into three buckets:

• “The school does not communicate well.”
• “The school’s communication is adequate.”
• “The school over-communicates.”

And here’s the uncomfortable part — we frequently hear the first and third answers from the same school community, sometimes in the same focus group. Parents who feel buried in email will also tell you they had no idea the enrollment deadline moved.

Both things are true at once. And that tells you the problem isn’t volume. It’s structure.

Marketing has long relied on the Rule of Seven — the idea that someone needs to encounter a message roughly seven times before they act on it. In today’s environment, most practitioners will tell you it’s closer to fifteen or twenty. So the instinct to repeat yourself is correct. Frequency is what keeps a parent from saying “I never saw that.”

But repetition without a system is just noise. Repetition with a system is reinforcement.

Three practices get you there.

Most schools have a newsletter. Very few schools have a newsletter their families genuinely rely on.

The difference is almost never the writing. It’s the predictability.

Same day. Same time. Every single week.

Pick Friday afternoon or Sunday evening and never move it. When a newsletter arrives at an unpredictable time, it’s an interruption. When it arrives at a predictable time, it becomes a habit — and habits are the only thing that survives a 2,800-message inbox.

What belongs in it:

• A short message from the President or Principal (voice matters more than length)
• The Week Ahead — every date, every time, in one place
• Athletic updates
• Special events and deadlines
• Lunch menus
• One student or faculty story

What makes it work:

• Use a real email platform. MailChimp, Constant Contact, or your SIS’s communication module — not a BCC blast from a staff Outlook account. You need images, links, mobile-responsive formatting, and above all, open-rate data. If you don’t know your open rate, you’re flying blind.
• Keep it scannable. Headings, short sections, a clear hierarchy. Assume a parent reads it on a phone while standing in a pickup line.
• Repurpose it. Post the principal’s message to your school blog. Pull an abstract for the parish bulletin. Turn one story into three social posts. You already wrote the content — stop writing it twice.

And then defend it. The newsletter only works if it’s the default destination for routine information. Which brings us to the practice that most schools skip.

This is the single most useful discipline we can offer a school, and it takes about twenty minutes to implement.

Not every channel costs your families the same amount of attention. Rank them from least intrusive to most intrusive, then match the channel to the actual weight of the message.

The Pyramid

Level 1 — Social Media (least intrusive): Broadcast to everyone, demanded of no one. Your families opt in by following you, and the ones who aren’t on social simply never see it. Nothing buzzes. Nothing interrupts. Perfect for celebration, culture, photos, and reinforcement. Use for: student achievements, photo galleries, mission moments, event recaps, general awareness.

Level 2 — Email: Still low-friction, but this is where the flood happens. The critical question isn’t how many emails your school sends — it’s who is sending them, and when. Use for: detail, context, anything a parent needs to reference later, the weekly newsletter.

Level 3 — Take-Home Paper: Old school, but still highly effective at the elementary level. A physical page placed in a child’s hand and carried into a kitchen cuts through digital noise precisely because it isn’t digital. It also reaches the families your email list keeps missing. Use for: enrollment packets, personalized letters, major deadlines, anything you need a parent to physically hold.

Level 4 — Text Message/Push Alerts: (most intrusive) A text interrupts. It buzzes in a meeting, at dinner, in the car. That intrusiveness is exactly why it works — and exactly why it must be rationed. Use for: safety, closures and delays, same-day changes, final-deadline reminders. That’s the list.

The moment you text families about the book fair, you’ve spent the credibility you needed for the snow day.

The Rule That Makes It Work

Every level costs you something. The higher you climb, the more you spend.

Text is a finite resource. Use it four times a year and families will read every one. Use it forty times and they’ll mute you — right before the morning you actually need them.

The Audit That Goes With It

Ask one question at your next leadership meeting: Who at our school can send an email to all families?

At most schools, the honest answer is “more people than anyone realized.” Teachers, coaches, the room-parent list, the auction committee, the athletic department, the parish office. Each one reasonable. Collectively — 14 hours.

The fix isn’t to silence anyone. It’s to route them:

• Routine information → the weekly newsletter (submit by Wednesday noon)
• Grade-level or team-specific → segmented lists, never all-school
• Celebration and culture → social media
• Genuinely urgent → text, and only with an administrator’s sign-off

One gatekeeper. One calendar. One weekly vehicle. Your total volume drops, and your open rates climb.

Here’s the situation at a lot of schools right now:

The SIS sends grades. A separate app handles the lunch account. Athletics runs on a team-scheduling app. The booster club lives in a Facebook group. Two grade levels have their own parent group chats or ClassDojo. Room parents use a text thread. And the school itself sends email.

That’s seven places a parent has to check to be a good parent. No one is checking seven places.

When information is scattered, families create their own workarounds — and those workarounds are almost always private group chats where your school has no voice at all. That’s how misinformation about your tuition increase spreads for three days before you hear about it.

What Consolidation Actually Looks Like

Step 1 — Inventory. Write down every platform, app, group, and channel through which your school currently communicates with families. Include the unofficial ones. Most schools are startled by the length of their own list.

Step 2 — Pick your single source of truth. Usually your SIS’s parent app, if it has real push notification and messaging capability. Sometimes a dedicated school communication platform. The specific product matters far less than the decision to have one.

Step 3 — Migrate the groups deliberately. Athletics, arts boosters, room parents, the auction committee, grade-level cohorts — each becomes a group inside the app rather than a separate island outside it. This is the hard part, and it takes a season. Do it group by group.

Step 4 — Make your calendar live there. One master calendar, always current, always accessible. If a parent has to email the office to ask when a game starts, your system has already failed.

Step 5 — Say it out loud, repeatedly. “Everything lives in the app.” At orientation, in the newsletter, on the website, at Back to School Night. Adoption is a communication project, not an IT project.

Why It’s Worth the Effort

• Push notifications sit between email and text on the pyramid — noticeable, but not intrusive. It gives you a middle gear you don’t currently have.
• Segmentation gets easy. The 5th-grade field trip reaches 5th-grade families instead of all 400.
• Parents stop having to remember where to look. One place. Always.
• You reclaim the informal conversation. When the official channel is genuinely convenient, the shadow group chats lose their reason to exist.

Communication Is Rarely Only a Communication Problem

The question this post opened with — “How well does the school communicate with its various constituencies?” — isn’t rhetorical. It’s part of Area #2, Planning and Communication, in an ISPD Operational Vitality Study. And we don’t ask it once. We ask it separately about parents, faculty and staff, students, your governing board, parishioners, and alumni, because the answers almost never match. A school that communicates beautifully with current parents is often invisible to its alumni.

Communication is one of more than twenty areas we evaluate. The others include governance and leadership, enrollment management, marketing and public relations, your website, database management, advancement and annual fund, facilities, parish–school collaboration, and your culture of belonging — examined through the National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Schools and ISPD’s Total Parish Development methodology, with 25 to 30 one-on-one stakeholder interviews behind the findings.

We look at all of it together because a communication problem is rarely only a communication problem. A school sending too much email usually doesn’t have an email problem — it has no plan, so every request becomes its own message. A school whose families feel uninformed often has a role-clarity problem: no one owns the calendar. And the school running seven disconnected apps generally has a database problem wearing a communication costume. Fix the message, and you treat the symptom. Find the cause and the message fixes itself.

→ ISPD Operational Vitality Study — or contact us to set up a free initial conversation about what one would look like at your school.

Putting It Together: One Real Example

Winter weather closure — the omni-channel version, run through the pyramid:

Same message, five touches, in under an hour — and every channel used for what it’s actually good at. That’s the Rule of Seven working for you instead of against you.

Start Here

You don’t need a communications director to fix this. You need three decisions:

1. Lock your newsletter to one day and one time, and route routine information into it.
2. Post the pyramid on your office wall and ask “what level is this?” before every all-school message.
3. Inventory your channels this month and name one place that will become your single source of truth.

The Montreal father in that CBC story never asked his children’s school to tell him less. He asked it to tell him better.

That’s a solvable problem.