The 2025 Back-to-School Checklist for School-Home Success

The first day of school is here, and the new year’s adventure starts now. Whether you’re mapping out messages, rallying your teams, or getting systems ready to roll, this checklist is your guide for the journey ahead and starting the year with confidence.

Grab your backpack and get ready to make this your best first day yet.

Chart Your Course

Review last year and take stock of where you are. What worked, what didn’t, and what does your district need?

Collect metrics and data. Gather available data to evaluate the current state of school-home communications and family engagement at your district.
Review the past year. Using the data you’ve collected, complete a retrospective (group or solo) to explore what went well and where there’s potential for improvement.
Assess stakeholder needs. What does effective communication look like for staff, teachers, families, students, coaches, and community members? Include requirements for any systems you use, including language and translation functionality.
Dream big. What would make your life easier next year? In a perfect world, what would you like school communications to be? Take some time to imagine your ideal future and capture insights.

Gather Your Gear

Pull out your playbooks and resources. What best practices for K-12 communications are available to help support your district’s needs?

Get an assessment report. Benchmark your communications environment against K-12 best practices and generate a personalized report.
Do a deep dive on district communications. Strengthen your toolkit with the Complete District Communications Playbook.
Review content and cadence. Review the best practices outlined in the Effective Family Communications Guide and incorporate them into your guidelines and standard practices.
Strengthen communications equity. Learn about proven strategies for overcoming communication barriers and reaching all of your families with the Reaching the Last 10% Best Practice Guide.
Tackle chronic absenteeism. Improving attendance starts long before the first bell. Review a summer guide that outlines five high-impact ways districts can strengthen school-home partnerships and get ahead of attendance challenges early.
Support every team, on and off the field. How do your coaches and extracurricular leaders communicate with your families? Learn how to help athletic directors and coaches simplify updates, increase participation, and stay connected with families.

Map the Route

Define your goals and lay out your strategy. What priorities and cadences make sense for your communications and family engagement this year?

Set goals and metrics. Determine your communication goals for this year and decide how you’ll track progress and measure success.
Update strategic plans. Use your retrospective and your review of best practices to update your communications plans, including crisis communications and documents.
Update your calendar. Make sure your public district calendar is complete, accurate, and up to date.
Set a schedule. Pick dates for all your regular communications (like monthly newsletters, seasonal messages, weekly communications, social media posts) and get them into your communications calendar.

Prep Your Pack

Make sure you’re equipped for success. Are all of your core communication and family engagement tools and channels in place?

Communication platform. What platform or tools will you and your stakeholders use for communication? Account for all the different types of communication required in your community, including district communications, classroom communications, extracurricular communications, and more.
Emergency alerts. What system will you use to communicate with your community in urgent situations? Consider events that require timely notification, such as closures or delays, as well as emergency situations like critical threats and natural disasters.
Website. What content management system will you use for your district and school websites? Determine who will be responsible for making changes and how, including maintaining calendars and posting updates.
Social media. Which social media accounts will you be actively using this year? Make sure they’re clearly identified for your community and integrated appropriately for cross-posting.
Phone system. How will your staff make phone calls home? Decide if they’re able to use a digital alternative to classroom landlines and set out any specific requirements for logging and reporting.
Digital payments. Does your district collect fees, donations, or payments from families? Explore digital payment solutions to streamline payments, improve transparency, and reduce administrative overhead.
Make a plan for sending documents with confidence. Do you have a process in place to deliver documents efficiently? Secure Document Delivery allows districts to share report cards, schedules, and more — digitally, privately, and with full delivery tracking.

Get Trail-Ready

Put your plan into action and make it happen. Are your templates, data, and content all updated and ready to go?

Update user access. Review and update authorized administrators for messaging platforms, social media, alerts, newsletters, etc. Remove users who may have left or changed roles, including teachers, principals, PTA volunteers, and community partners.
Clean out last year’s content. Archive last year’s communications and content from your school-home communications platform so you have a fresh start. Review links and resources for families on all of your public-facing platforms to make sure they’re accurate and up to date.
Refresh visual assets. Take new headshots of school leaders/board members and update your online properties with fresh photos. Replace any visual assets on your website and communication platform that are out of date.
Organize and share out templates. Create or update message templates for alerts (snow days, lockdowns, outages, etc.) and announcements (staff training day reminders, etc.), as well as design templates for weekly or monthly newsletters. Share these out to district and site staff for consistent branding.

Hit the Trail

It’s finally here. Start your year off strong! Are you proactively reaching out to stakeholders and getting them ready to engage?

Welcome teachers & staff. Send a welcome back announcement to your teachers and staff, and share your communications guidelines, best practices, and training schedule.
Train teachers and staff. Make communications part of back-to-school professional development for all staff and teachers, so they understand policies, how to use available tools, and how to communicate effectively with families.
Send policy reminders to teachers and staff. Send staff and teachers updates with key communications policies (how to protect student and staff PII, emergency protocols, who to contact for communications support, etc.).
Reach out to new families and students. Send a welcome message to all of your new families and encourage them to download your communications app(s) and, if necessary, opt in to required communication groups.
Send an app download reminder to returning families. Send a reminder message to returning families that haven’t registered for your communications platform and encourage them to install the app(s) and confirm their contact details are correct.
Welcome everyone back to school. Now that everyone’s onboarded, send a welcome post to everyone. Include key dates such as packet pick-up, the first day of school, and back-to-school night.
Establish 100% contactability for families. Review all failed text, email, phone, app notifications and correct email/texts that didn’t work in your database of record.
Review data processes. How can families correct or update their contact information? How will you maintain accurate contact data in your database of record? Make sure a solid process is in place so families know where to go and staff know how to get data corrected.
Test emergency alerts. Test emergency broadcast systems before the year begins to confirm that your processes work, your contact data is valid, and your systems are operational.

Other Back-to-School Tasks

Feel free to add your own specific items!

Pack a crisis comms emergency kit. Store key items at work in case you need to act as spokesperson and manage a crisis — suit jacket, make-up, water, energy bars, phone charger, tissues, hand sanitizer, etc.
Celebrate! You’re all set up for a great school year with engaged families!

About ParentSquare

ParentSquare is the leading family engagement infrastructure helping K-12 districts nationwide reach every family with an award-winning, all-in-one communication platform. Reaching over 22 million students nationwide, ParentSquare helps districts consolidate disconnected tools and outdated communication systems with personalized messaging, websites, forms, payments, and more — in one easy-to-use platform. With powerful features for achieving 100% contactability, two-way translation into 190+ languages, and purpose-built AI enhancements, ParentSquare empowers districts to invite every family to be involved in their student’s education, no matter their home language or the device they use.

Recognized for growth and innovation by Inc. 5000, GSV 150, and more, ParentSquare was founded in 2011 in Santa Barbara, California. Learn more at parentsquare.com.