We believe effective communication is critical to engage our students’ families as valued partners. Parents and guardians are one of our most important stakeholders and drivers of student engagement and achievement. Therefore, it is mission critical to build and sustain positive relationships. Four ways that we build and sustain relationships at Turner are through home visits, academic partnering, community nights, and ongoing communications.

Home Visits (HV): Home visits are the first step in building relational trust with our students and parents. All teachers will receive HV training through Flamboyan and are expected to go on home visits. Our school goal is 80% of all students will receive a home visit from their teacher. Home visits are a core component of our commitment to school community (CSC).

Academic Partnering: All teachers and staff participate in Academic Parent-Teacher Team meetings. During these trimester meetings, parents learn about their child’s reading and math progress to date, set goals for the next trimester, and take home activities and resources that they can use with their child to drive progress towards the academic goal.

Community Nights: Valuing our parents as partners means providing learning opportunities and resources for them to best advocate and support their child in school. Our 8 community nights are designed to give parents shared learning experiences on content that will help them best help their children. All staff are expected to participate in at least two community nights throughout the school year.

On-going Communication: Teachers maintain constant communication with all parents through letters, e-mail, notices, telephone calls, texts, social media, and/or conferences. Communications should primarily reflect student academic or SEL progress, positive reinforcement, or information updates. The ratio of positive to negative communications should be 8:1. All staff will receive initial or refresher on going communication training.

Instructional time should not be interrupted to make parent phone calls or to send text messages. In almost all cases, parent phone calls should be made and received during non-instructional times. This includes calls or texts for student behavior concerns.

Parents will receive the following systemic/ regular communications from school administration and individual classrooms:

• Thursday Folders (class and school-wide communications)
• Monthly Newsletters
• Mid-advisory progress reports
• Report Cards
• Robo-call announcements
• Attendance communications

Note: Monthly newsletters (following approval by grade level communications lead), will be distributed by the first Thursday of each new month. Newsletters will be created by grade level teams (see newsletter template) and sent home in the “Thursday Folder”. This folder will house all documentation from the classroom and school at large. Any communication from school to home and home to school will occur through this folder. A comment card will be added on the inside pocket of the communication folder. On this card, teachers and parents may write notes to keep each other informed of student concerns/needs. This form of communication will be addressed during the initial home visit for our families.