How do you make your Parent-Teacher Conferences "parent friendly"? Do you hold the conferences "sacred" and allow no staff to be absent for practices, games, conferences, etc.? How do you schedule them to avoid the afore-mentioned conflicts?

Rebecca Hale

At the Alcester-Hudson school, we do not allow staff to be gone for practices, conferences, games, etc. We ask the coaches to have practice in the morning. When we have conferences from 2:30-4:00 and from 5:00-8:00, they can practice during that hour when we are scheduled for supper. Our coaches will sometimes bring something to eat when they do not have conferences if they do this. We have a coach at our elementary school that only has elementary P.E. classes. He schedules his meetings so he can supervise the gym. This allows a team time to warm-up before the coach gets there and gives the coach one good hour with the kids. The coach at the elementary school supervises the locker rooms when the coach leaves for conferences.

We make it mandatory to be there. Then we offer parents times a block of time to schedule in. My sec. gives the exact time and we send that back out to parents. If they forget to show, we call them right away to reschedule. We get 100% show!!! If you have more questions, please let me know.

We give parents rides who do not have adequate transportation. We've serve chili brunch. We make all teachers attend, however last Thursday our football team had a home game @6:00 MDT, and our conferences ran until 7:00. We gave all our parents in attendance a free pass to the game. Our attendance at conferences has improved tremendously from my first year here! Good Luck!

At the elementary level, we do hold that time sacred - everyone needs to be here (and it's been the tradition so we're never questioned on that). We schedule them early so teachers know. As far as parent friendly - we send out fliers where parents choose times. Our teachers are very good at following up on "no-shows" - they'll continue to call until they get some sort of conference out of it! Hope this answers your question!

June Gaston
Principal, Lowell Elementary
367-8378
gastonj@sf.k12.sd.us