Parents Say Schools Need To Improve Their Customer Service
A new survey found that most parents feel that their children's schools are lacking proper customer service standards.
Teachers and school staff are not generally regarded as customer service workers. They are categorized as educators, community workers, and sometimes experts, but the fact of the matter is that public school workers are caring for other people’s children. The families involved pay local, state, and federal tax dollars that keep the education system running. In order to better serve communities, parents have one major suggestion for schools: improve customer service measures.
The National Report on Parent-School Trust and Engagement was recently released to reveal this insight. It is a quarterly report that details how many times parents contacted schools regarding their children, how their concerns were addressed, and what trust levels parents experienced regarding their children’s schools. As enrollment has reached historic declines and teachers are quitting in droves, this information is vital to ensuring that public schools continue thriving, so it is no wonder that customer service is being emphasized.
School choice is a topic that threatens the current education system because many public schools are failing students. Instead of focusing on core subjects — like many private schools and homeschooling parents do — taxpayer-funded schools have now been directed by The Biden Administration to focus on gender theory and critical race theory concepts. Parents who oppose these measures have been vilified, silenced, and even arrested. Despite paying for these learning institutes, many families have not been treated like customers deserving good service, instead, plenty have been treated as if they do not have the right to know what their children are learning.
The aforementioned report did not acknowledge these shortcomings but did mention the use of media attention and “misinformation” to sway parent-school trust. Instead of committing to improving school standards to compete with more successful alternative education options, the report also blamed school choice for the declining trust of families. This does nothing to address the underlying issues connected to a greater need for better customer service, but the report did detail that 60% of parents admitted that schools need to improve their ability to serve students and parents.
It was also noted that 87% of parents contacted their children’s school district at least one time. This displays just how much parents wish to be involved in their children’s educational process. 44% of parents noted that they had to contact their child’s school six or more times. Parents who received better customer service were more likely to trust their child’s school, whereas parents who had to wait days or weeks for callbacks and spoke with staff members who did not empathize with them were not satisfied and less likely to trust the school.
Most parents want their children to receive the best education possible. They want to help their children succeed and expect schools to work with them to achieve that goal. Without proper customer service, public schools cannot appease families, meet their needs, or compete with education alternatives that provide more personalized experiences. If and how this information will be utilized to update Department of Education standards is unknown, but education is a much more political topic than it has been throughout the past, and parents are expected to vote based on those needs this fall.
