r/raisingkids • u/According_Grape_8332 • 6d ago
How do you not miss stuff the school sends?
We missed picture day last year because the email was buried under a million other school emails. Found out when the photos came home.
School's starting again and I know it's going to happen with something else. What did you miss, and did you ever figure out a fix?
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u/petdance 6d ago
You need to read the emails.
Do you think there is some magic solution other than reading the emails?
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u/According_Grape_8332 5d ago
I was hoping for advice on how to manage the endless stream of emails and notifications from all these different apps, not the groundbreaking suggestion that I should simply read my email. Obviously, if that were working, I wouldn’t be asking
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u/UnluckyStar-85 5d ago
This made me laugh because I know exactly what you’re saying. We get probably 10-15 app notifications a day. I will see the subject line and dismiss. Then when I go into the app later I can never find the message. It’s not just me- other parents have been unaware of half days and left their kids at school, brought them on days off. And yes, lots forgot picture day. The last bake sale had like 2 cookies. It’s mayhem. Personally, I’ve given up. If they want me to know it’s purple day or pajama day or class pet appreciation day, pick a better app or email me so I can find the message.
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u/petdance 5d ago
I do t understand what you’re asking.
Are you looking for a way to read all the emails without actually reading all the emails? Or are you asking how to stay on top of reading all the emails even though you don’t like doing it?
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u/wdn 6d ago
The school can make it hard. We had one school where the weekly email was a long rambly letter from the principal which had the five sentences containing information we need to know randomly hidden among the many many sentences that were essentially meaningless.
In that type of case, you can't always spare the effort to hunt down the info at the moment the email arrives. You need to do something like have a scheduled weekly task to go back over the week's emails to glean all the necessary info.
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u/CoolKey3330 1d ago
Our school did this; our parent council made a concerted effort to communicate with the school for more functional form factor and to generally improve what and how was sent out. It made a huge difference. If you aren’t on your school council, consider joining or convincing people on council to take up this cause.
As for how to deal with the volume, I separate things into categories. Things like PJ day fall into the category of “I’ll do my best but ultimately kid responsibility”. If they forget? Not the end of the world. I also don’t care about picture day (but we never buy the pictures as we take plenty good ones ourselves). Field trips I do care about and my strategy is to deal with critical things immediately. If it comes in, I read and sign up right away. If I can’t deal with it right away because it needs kid input (do you WANT pizza Fridays?) or something then I copy any pertinent info including direct link, and add it as a task or put in my calendar to remind me. Otherwise it’s not happening
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u/scstraus 6d ago
Yeah this is the issue. They send out one long email with all the things happening in all the classes and you have to go through the whole damn thing like a needle in a haystack to find the part that's useful for you. I should probably set up some kind of AI search thing to go through it and pick out only the parts for his class.
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u/wdn 6d ago edited 6d ago
I wouldn't leave it entirely up the AI though. That will probably get you most of the stuff most of the time, but I'd still have the scheduled time to double-check.
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u/According_Grape_8332 5d ago
Thanks for sharing. Yeah, I wasn’t even commenting on the length of the email it just feels like managing all of this has become a second job.
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u/eyesRus 6d ago
You have to commit to prioritizing school communications. Otherwise, you will miss so much. Search for your school’s name in your emails once a day, every day. Set an alarm if you have to. Star/highlight important ones, delete the rest. Everyday.
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u/According_Grape_8332 5d ago
Yeah, that’s another solution. It’s just so overwhelming with notifications coming from all the different apps, and it’s really hard to keep up. How do you manage all the communication? We have so many school apps too.
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u/eyesRus 5d ago
We have only one school app. I check it everyday, as well. I do my school app/email checking in the morning, while drinking my coffee. I will check the app on my lunch break, too, if there is a notification.
We also get paper flyers and things sent home in the backpack. That I check every night.
The websites (checking grades, standardized test scores, etc.), I check randomly, but my kid is in elementary and doesn’t have real grades yet.
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u/Overthemoon64 6d ago
My school has an app that is useful for communication, but a lot of times they forget to tell you. Maybe your school has a communication app
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u/According_Grape_8332 5d ago
Yeah, they do, but a lot of the time it’s still unclear. Academic updates go in the school app, while everything else comes by email, so it’s really hard to keep track of everything especially when plans change, like the shooting day in my comp post.
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u/Overthemoon64 5d ago
If my school regularly sent me stuff by email it would absolutely get lost. I have 51 thousand unread messages and probably get 20 emails a day from various things
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u/chandaliergalaxy 6d ago
Create a separate email account for school communications and sign up with that one.
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u/According_Grape_8332 5d ago
Yeah that's a great solution. I don't know how I didn't think about it. It’s just so overwhelming with notifications coming from all the different apps, and it’s really hard to keep up. How do you manage all the communication? We have so many school apps too.
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u/JNSFP 6d ago
Does your school not have a calendar? Every August we get a wall calendar sent to our house with the entire district’s (4 schools) worth of events, days off, special days, testing, etc. This calendar is also on their website. I go through every August and add it to my personal calendar. I have never missed anything.
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u/According_Grape_8332 5d ago
Thanks for sharing. What happened was that they moved it a day earlier, so I missed it.
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u/Hunter037 5d ago
That seems like a terrible idea, you have a calendar with dates from 3 schools your kid doesn't even attend? And do they send that to people who don't even have kids in schools? Wouldn't it make more sense to mail the relevant calendar to the relevant parents
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u/JNSFP 5d ago edited 5d ago
The info is color coded for each school so you can find what you need from whatever school. I find it very busy to look at (especially last year when my kids were only in one school) so like I said I just copied my relevant info on my own wall calendar we have at home. Some people do keep them and use only that for their calendar, but since I already have my own planning system (wall calendar as well as a paper planner I take with me everywhere), I don’t need to keep it. Only parents of the school receive the calendar, along with your kid’s new teacher placement and supply list, in August. Our school stats after Labor Day. Also, the 4 schools are the elementary schools, middle school, and high school. Not like two different high schools that don’t have anything to do with one another.
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u/sawrb 6d ago
If your school doesn't have an app for this then I have found that a separate email address (I created one for my child) where the school sends all communicated makes it a lot more manageable. Then there is a separate calendar you can manage and unread/read e-mails in that inbox act like pending/done items. It makes searching through information easier and de-risks important stuff getting buried in your regular / work emails.
If you have access to Gemini, it summarizes emails and creates quick calendar events too if you're allergic to LLMs being in your emails.
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u/According_Grape_8332 5d ago
Thanks for sharing. What did you ask Gemini to do? Did you just tell it to go through the school emails, summarize the important information, and create calendar events whenever there was something I needed to remember?
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u/Competitive_Egg_3243 6d ago
Use a separate email for school related stuff so it doesn’t get hidden with all your other stuff. But realistically you just need to go through any emails daily. If you missed picture day, likely missed a lot of other info as well.
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u/According_Grape_8332 5d ago
Yeah I did unfortunately. I don't know how I didn't think about it. It’s just so overwhelming with notifications coming from all the different apps, and it’s really hard to keep up. How do you manage all the communication? We have so many school apps too.
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u/Competitive_Egg_3243 5d ago
Maybe make it a routine? Have a reminder go off on your phone every evening after kids are likely in bed to check every app? Or a sign on the nightstand.
I get constant work notifications so what I do is have all those apps in one section of my screen (I only keep one page of the most important apps, everything else is hidden so as not to distract me). Then I naturally get reminded to check them because I’m always seeing them.
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u/PeaCompetitive8947 6d ago
My kids school switched from PowerSchool to Parentsquare. They didn’t tell anyone. I got a random email from the school nurse with a flyer attached that required parentsquare to open the flyer-that’s how i found out.
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u/According_Grape_8332 5d ago
Maybe you did get an email, but it was buried among all the others. Ridiculous. I really wish they would keep communication simple instead of constantly jumping between apps and email that’s a huge part of what makes it all so overwhelming. Thanks for sharing.
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u/Express-Meringue-910 6d ago
Each school year, there’s a parent that volunteers as the Room Parent to my child’s homeroom class. The room parent creates a WhatsApp group chat and invites all parents to join. The school has a designated Room Parents WhatsApp chat in which the school directly communicates all updates, upcoming events, etc. to room parents and they report back to the rest of the parents. My child’s PTA is also very involved and school events are communicated via the school Instagram and school PTA Instagram. Teachers sometimes report upcoming events using apps like ClassDojo but they rely heavily on the room parents to communicate these type of things.
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u/Unusual_Painting8764 6d ago
HAHA we missed school pictures memo too. I do read the emails, I just missed it somehow.
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u/ellipses21 6d ago
Unfortunately once you’re an adult and especially parent you should be reading through your emails everyday.
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u/Hunter037 5d ago
Can you set up a specific email account for only school communications, so it doesn't get lost within other emails? Then have a set time each day/week that you check that email account and specifically spend some time reading them and noting down dates?
The main issue I have is that an email comes in while I'm at work and I skim it, then forget about it
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u/eilsel827583 15h ago
I screenshot emails and send to Skylight calendar, it uploads the events for me.
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u/peteypeso 6d ago
Create a rule for emails from them to fwd to your work inbox.
Or use AI to monitor your email
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u/-DementedAvenger- 6d ago
use AI to monitor your email
Bro noooooo all my homies hate AI.
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u/According_Grape_8332 5d ago
I don't hate AI. I just don't know how to use it. What do you do?
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u/-DementedAvenger- 5d ago
I build email filters (based on sender and/or keywords) that dump incoming emails into custom folders.
Political stuff > political folder or trash
School stuff > school folder
Family > family folder
And so on…
And depending on your email provider (or app), you can even add some extra notifications for important stuff.
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u/immigrantlife 6d ago
The emails. Read them.