Telling Our Story

Telling Our Story How the Ottauquechee School increased family engagement

The Back Story

We Discovered a Need- On our SAS and TFI we noticed that we were scoring low in the areas of family awareness and engagement. We also noticed that we had very few parent volunteers in the school. We had dwindling numbers of parents attending school events and daytime presentations. When talking to parents we discovered that most of them didn't understand what PBIS was and couldn't explain why or how their children were being recognized.

SAS - School has formal strategies for informing families about expected student behaviors at school.

More than 100% increase.

TFI- Stakeholders (students, families, and community members) provide input on universal foundations (expectations, consequences, acknowledgements) at least every 12 months.

No Change!

What Did We Do About It?

The universal team decided to change our story. Parents weren't aware of the great things happening at OQS and were telling "their" story out in the community...a story not favorable to our climate and culture.

Using Social Media

Increased Facebook posts showing student engagement, staff interactions, parent volunteers, special events, student presentations, PTO sponsored events.
Digital Newletter with videos highlighting one interesting thing each week.

Staff Interactions

Student Team Building

Student Special Event

Student Presentation- Grade 2

Art Show

Student Presentation- Grade 1

Parent Volunteers- Garden Club

Principal Helping During STEAM time.

Math Night

Family Game Night

FB Post Data

PIcture one shows the number of people reached over the course of the year in 2017-18. Picture two shows the number of people reached over the course of the year in 2018. Picture three shows the number of people reached in just September of this year.

This year we're off to a great start with 51% increase in page views and a 231% increase in the number of people reached since the start of school.

Since the start of school this year we have had a 105% increase in post engagment.

As I incresed the number of FB posts and began to tell the story we wanted people to know about our school we began to get more positive feedback in the way of comments on FB, emails to teachers and myself. Parents would share positive comments during drop off and pick up times. The overall feel of the school changed. More and more parents were showing up at after school, evening and during school day events. We started noticing an increase in attendance at our community meetings held on Weds. and Fri. mornings. Everytime a class presented there would be close to 100% attendance that seemed to be generational; mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents!

The number of daytime presentations increased due to a shift in our teaching practice. Our teachers were creating and delivering more project based learning units and lessons which required students to present to authentic audiences. Despite the inconvience of a daytime presentation we were consistently having nearly 100% attendance from family members; parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. We suspected there was a correlation.

Volunteers

There was a a dramatic jump in the number of volunteers forms filled out in the first month of school as indicated by the first two columns. And an increase in the number of total volunteer forms filled out over the course of two years as indicated in the last two columns; a 70% increase between 2017/18 and 2018/19. During the 2017-18 year we concentrated on boosting our positive FB posts and creating a story of greatness.

What Else? "The Howler"

I created a digital newsletter called "The Howler" since our mascot is the wolf. Since most families engage regularly with some form of digital device we decided to use it to our advantage. Adding a video clip to the beginning of each edition served two purposes; to draw parents in because what parent doesn't want to see a clip of their kid learning? And to help connect families to a small but positive part of the Ottauquechee day. It would help to tell our story!

Since parents didn't seem to know what PBIS was and they couldn't explain what our acknowlagement system was we decided to include a block specifically devoted to one small part of PBIS each week. Short and concise.

Each week there is a special section in the "Howler" explaining the different aspects of PBIS at Ottauquechee School.

What does the data show?

The number of subscribers to our newletter has increased along with an upward trend in the number of times someone opens the newsletter and clicked on one of the links.

What We'd Like to Do Now

We'd like to explore more and gather more concrete evidence of this phenomenon and move it beyond a hunch.

Parent Survey For This Year

Appreciate