Cairo - School Report Question and Answers
How is the overall communication between teachers and parents, and the administration and parents? How is communication facilitated?
I can only speak for the elementary school level. Classroom teachers wrote a weekly blog post that included important info and a summary of learning. WhatsApp groups for grades or classes were popular, though sometimes you might get hundreds of messages in a day with people replying "thumbs up" or "smiley" to a comment. But they were my best source of info. School sent out a weekly e-newsletter. It was wordy and extensive, but I did read it weekly (many didn't). PTO had a Facebook group and several parts of school (library, booster, etc) had FB pages. There is the line between enough info and not enough and people argued on both sides. In general, I felt there was enough info. On a personal teacher level, our K teacher was always responsive to my emails. Conferences happened 3 times a year (4 for K, but not sure about other levels). We had a "meet and greet" conference in the beginning where you got to share goals, end of 1st trimester, end of 2nd trimester, and right before the end of the year there was a Kid Led Conference where they showed off what they learned. Older elementary I think did student-led 2nd trimester as well. K also did several events for parents to come in and see things. I did feel that specialists didn't communicate what was happening in class very well. They all had blogs, but very rarely updated them. Some classes, like art, I at least ended up seeing final products. Classes like Drama I have very little idea what they did in class. - Feb 2020
Communication is pretty good, although it takes some effort. We need to look at daily e-mails, daily blogs on the net, weekly newsletters, and student agendas. - Feb 2017
A - Jan 2011
Teachers are very good at sending e-mails if there is trouble or something big coming up, and at responding if you send them something (both in HS and elementary). At elementary level, any playground disagreements or issues as well as tantrums or other difficulties are reported daily, if they need to be addressed right away. - Jun 2010
