You Are Worth My Time
June 15, 2026
When Supervision is a Culture Shift
June 15, 2026
Rabbi Dr. Levi Druin
A mother sits across from me the week after Rosh Hashanah. Her son is starting third grade with us. She is polite, tightly wound, and clearly waiting for the moment the conversation turns into a list of his deficits. She has done this meeting before, at two other schools. After the second meeting, she learned to stop expecting good news.
What happens over the next thirty minutes will shape whether her son’s reading intervention works. Not because the intervention itself is variable. The intervention is solid; we have done it before. It will work or fail in large part based on whether his mother believes us when we tell her he is making progress, whether she reinforces it at home in the way we suggest, whether she sends her son to school on the mornings he is melting down at the door, and whether she stands up for school in front of him on the hard days.
In this way, the parent meeting is part of “instruction.”
Parent Connection Is Instructional Leadership
Many treat instructional leadership and parent engagement as two different folders. One is for the principal sitting beside the teacher in a planning meeting, while the other is useful for the principal at the parent breakfast. Curriculum sits on one shelf, communication on another.
This split is a mistake, and a particularly costly mistake, in our schools. In a Jewish day school, home and school are not separate worlds. They share a calendar, a vocabulary, and a set of expectations about who the child is becoming. The bridge between them is load-bearing, not merely decorative. Children are in school for six to eight hours a day, but for the other sixteen hours, they are at home, and whether what we taught at 10 a.m. is reinforced or quietly contradicted at 8 p.m. determines if it will stick. The parents are part of the instructional system, even if the school leaves them out.
For schools serving alternative learners, the parent-school connection is even less subtle. Children with learning differences arrive carrying their parents’ history. The parents’ faith in the next school is almost always lower than it was in the first one. They have been told their child is a problem, and they have been told their child is fine. They have been told their child needs medication, doesn’t need medication, needs a different curriculum, needs more sleep, and needs more discipline. By the time they meet the next principal, they are tired, suspicious, and, in many cases, feel like they’re doing the work of believing in their child mostly alone.
When they leave a meeting feeling like a partner with the school or an advocate for and defender of their child, it changes what kind of school year their child gets. The resulting parent-school connection is not a meaningless outcome; it is a precondition for the academic work to land.
Connection-by-Accident
If parent connection is part of instruction, why do most schools handle it the way they handle the parking lot, functionally, but without thought? There are three reasons, none of them shameful, but all preventable.
The first is the squeaky-wheel problem. Loud parents get the most attention. They call, they email, they show up at carpool with a question, or they private-message the office manager. Their children’s teachers know them by first name. Meanwhile, the parents of the quiet, compliant child often go three months without anyone reaching out to them unless there is a billing reminder. The communication frequency of most schools tracks parental noise levels rather thanstudent needs.
The second is the crisis cycle. Schools call home when something is wrong. They can be honest, polite, and even kind, but the reason for the call is almost always because there is a problem. Over the course of a year, this trains parents to associate the school’s voice with bad news, the way patients learn to dread the dentist’s number on the caller ID. By the time something genuinely positive needs to be communicated, the parent’s stomach has dropped before even reading the message.
The third is time math. Connection feels soft, and the harder-edged instructional work, such as lesson observation, curriculum planning, or data review, fills up the calendar. The principal who spends a morning at a parent breakfast feels guilty at 11 a.m. for not having been in classrooms. Connection becomes what happens in the gaps, such as in the parking lot at dismissal. This kind of communication and connection may be sincere, but it’s never structured.
Designing for Connection
The school leaders I admire most have made one quiet decision. They have stopped treating connection as the residue of a busy day and decided to design for it. Designing for connection is not just about having a great relationship with parents. Designing for connection is structural. It is a set of decisions about who gets contacted when, by whom, about what, regardless of how the day is going. Here are the six principles of designing for connection.
The first is predictable cadence. Parents should never have to wonder whether they will hear from the school this month. They should know. Whether it is a Friday note, a monthly call from the homeroom teacher, or a quarterly meeting with the resource team, the schedule is published, communicated, and held. The point is not the medium. The point is that the parent’s brain stops scanning for absence. The parents know contact is coming. That alone lowers the temperature of every interaction.
The second is asymmetric outreach. The school reaches out before the parent has to. This inverts the path of least resistance. Most communication systems wait for the parent to ask, and they reward parents who ask the loudest. An asymmetric system has the school reaching out first, on a schedule, especially to families who are not asking. The simplest version is a rule. Every family hears something specific about their child from a teacher every two weeks, and a flag goes up if any family does not.
The third is surfacing the academic, not just the behavioral. Most parent communication tilts toward conduct. “He had a tough morning.” “She was wonderful at recess.” “He forgot his folder again.” Conduct matters. But if the only news parents get is about conduct, they receive their child as a behavior-management problem rather than as a learner. Communication that names a specific academic moment, like, “today he caught an error in his own work and corrected it before I could point it out,” teaches the parent how to see their child the way the teacher does. Over the course of a year, this changes the conversation at home.
At our school, every family receives a weekly principal’s report on their child. It is not a newsletter. It is a per-student snapshot, color-coded green, blue, or red, across roughly six dimensions. Behavior is one of them. The others are academic effort, independent work, peer interaction, davening, and social-emotional growth. Teachers submit the ratings; the report goes home under the school’s name in the same format every Monday, so parents read it as part of the school’s rhythm rather than as a teacher’s preference.
The form lives in a Google Sheet, and a teacher can complete it in under thirty seconds per child, even when blues and reds are involved. For most students, most weeks, the rating is a click-through of mostly green. We rarely see two reds in a row on the same student, because a red triggers a conversation right away, and the issue is addressed before the next report goes out. Multiplied across a class, it is real time, but it is a small amount of time built into the rhythm of the week.
Parents reading the report on a Monday afternoon are not receiving a discipline update. They are receiving their child as a learner with multiple named, observable dimensions, most of which are ordinarily green. This weekly principal’s report is the single most boring, structurally important thing we do.
The fourth principle is designing for the parent who is not asking. Schools tend to mistake silence for satisfaction. Sometimes silence is satisfaction. Often, silence means parents are overwhelmed, intimidated, have a language barrier, are buried under a busy work schedule, or have learned to be skeptical from the previous school. In our school, we are rolling out a system this year that flags families with whom we have not been in touch for six weeks.
A parent-connection design that only works for parents already inclined to engage is not a design at all. It is a sorting mechanism. The question is not whether parents are engaged. It is whether the school’s own design is what their silence is responding to. The family that has not initiated contact in six weeks may be telling you about your school, not about themselves. A “flag” system that catches them is the structural piece. The willingness to read the flag honestly is the harder piece.
For years, we read low parent-teacher conference signups as a story about parent disengagement. The conventional wisdom inside the school building was that families had moved on, were too busy, and were not prioritizing the meetings. When I sat down to rebuild our school’s scheduling system, I expected the work to take me weeks, but it only took two hours. I made the path obvious, made the invitation feel personal, and removed the small friction points that had been causing parents to walk away.
Signup rates went above 85 percent. The parents had not changed—just the system they were navigating had. The silence we had been reading as apathy was a design failure on our end. That distinction is the whole discipline of designing for the parent who is not asking.
The fifth principle is connection during calm. The single most underused window in school leadership is the gap between the warm Elul welcome and the first incident report. In most schools, that gap is filled with logistics. In a designed system, it is filled with low-stakes, positive, specific contact. The call is not about anything wrong. The note that names something the child did well. The offhand mention that the teacher noticed the parent’s question from the last meeting and addressed it. Trust built in calm is trust available in crisis. This is not sentimentality; it is account-balance arithmetic.
Finally, the sixth principle: treating parent meetings as instruction in their own right. A parent-teacher conference is a teaching moment. The teacher is teaching the parent how to read their child. What you say and how you sequence it, what artifacts you bring, whether you start with the strength or the gap, whether the parent leaves knowing one specific thing they can do at home, or just a fog of impressions—all of it is craft. Schools that design for connection rehearse parent meetings the way they rehearse lessons. Schools that don’t design for it ad-lib them and then wonder why some parents leave energized, while others leave defensive.
The Costs of Parent Connection
Designing for parent connection comes with costs, but the costs are smaller than people think. Rebuilding our parent-teacher conference scheduling took me two hours. The weekly report takes a teacher under thirty seconds per child. Once the systems are in place, they run without heroic effort. That is the entire point of designing instead of reacting. The expensive thing is rarely the system. It is the willingness to look at your own design honestly enough to build the system in the first place.
But some of the costs are real. The weekly report only works because every teacher does it, every Friday, on a child they may not have wanted to think about in a structured way that week. That cannot be optional. It needs to be scheduled, expected, modeled, and held even when someone has had a hard week. If it is added on top of every other initiative without making space for it, it will quietly die in the second month, and everyone will pretend it didn’t.
There is the cost of administrative discipline. The “flag” system that catches the family no one has talked to is a real piece of software, not a vibe. Someone must own it. Someone needs to review it weekly. Someone has to follow up.
There is a cost to pay in comfort. Some teachers will resist. The teachers who pride themselves on parents being a little afraid of them are not, in my experience, the strongest instructional teachers. But they exist, and the principal who designs for connection has to hold a line that some staff would prefer not be held.
Also, this kind of design invites abuse. A small number of parents will treat predictable access as unlimited access. A school will need protocols and response-time norms that are humane to teachers and clear to parents, and the willingness to train families, kindly, into the rhythm of the system rather than letting the loudest few set the pace. These are real costs. Any school leader pretending otherwise has not actually tried to do this at scale.
What Schools Gain from Parent Connection
When a school commits to connection by design, three things shift. The first hard call of the year is no longer the first call of the year. The parents have been hearing from this teacher, this school, this principal for weeks already, mostly about specific, real, ordinary things their child did. When the hard call comes, the parent picks up not as a defendant but as a collaborator. The conversation that would have taken hours of de-escalation takes 15 minutes of problem-solving.
The second gain is that the home becomes a reinforcer of the school’s instructional moves rather than a counterweight to them. A parent who knows, specifically, that the school is teaching her son to self-correct his work is a parent who notices when he self-corrects at home and names it. A parent who only knows that her son’s behavior was rough this week is a parent who walks in the door scanning for misbehavior. The frame the school provides at home is itselfinstruction.
The third, and the one most often missed, is that the principal’s instructional leadership in classrooms becomes more durable. Curriculum changes, teacher coaching, intervention rollouts—none of these survive if the community does not trust the school. The parent-connection architecture, then, is truly what supports the instructional architecture.
One mother’s son finished his first year with us, reading at grade level for the first time in his life. She told me at our meeting after Pesach that she had stopped waiting for the bad call around Chanukah. I asked her what changed. She said,“You guys called me about him. Not about a problem with him, just about him.”
There was no curriculum innovation in that call. There was a teacher who had been asked, on a schedule, to tell the parents something specific about what their child had done that week. She did, in two minutes, on a Tuesday afternoon. The mother heard her child described as a learner. She started to relax. Six weeks later, when the child had a hard week, the conversation about it landed in soft ground.
Designing for parent connection is instructional leadership. It seems to be a small thing, and it is often ignored. But it’s something that the best schools build by hand, on purpose, on a schedule, by design. The schools that get the most nachas from their teachers’ best instruction are not the ones with the most charismatic principals or the most polished newsletters. They are the ones who decided, at some level of detail their parents will never see, that the connection was too important to be left to chance.
Rabbi Dr. Levi Druin is the principal of Pardes Day School, a Jewish day school in Miami Beach serving students with diverse learning profiles. His work focuses on instructional leadership, school operating systems, teacher training, and the structural design choices that determine whether a school’s care for its students actually reaches them. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife and children.