Rural schools face unique challenges when it comes to engaging parents—limited time, long bus routes, small staff teams. But parent engagement remains a powerful driver of school reputation, trust, and student success. In this session, you’ll learn which factors have the strongest influence on whether parents would recommend your schools—a key indicator of overall satisfaction. While you can’t control your geography or demographics, there are key “switches” you can flip. Rob from School Perceptions will share statewide parent engagement findings, and Patrick from the Colby School District will walk through how they moved the needle on those metrics and built a local parent report card to sustain growth.

Methodology:

Rob and Patrick will begin with some parent engagement “bell work.” Attendees will be asked to self-reflect on factors that might affect parent satisfaction with their schools and produce a list. Following this, attendees will be asked to share their list with their group, sorting their factors into the controllable and uncontrollable. The audience will also be asked to share these controllable factors with us. Rob will specifically focus on how these controllable factors affect overall parent satisfaction. Finally, and most importantly, Patrick will explain which elements of parent engagement Colby was able to improve the most, what they did to achieve the year-over-year growth, and examples of how they are incorporating that data into a locally created report card.