Tag: communications

This post was authored by a current RCF parent.

I’m a RCF parent of two children and we love our school and our community. My kids are in the neighborhood program and we live close to school in a neighborhood of mostly single family homes. One of the things I most love about RCF is its beautiful and enriching diversity, and I don’t just mean that as a catch word. At school my children have friends from many different backgrounds, of different races, religions, and who speak different languages. I value this, as I know so many other parents do, as a critical part of all of our children’s education. Unfortunately, that same breadth of diversity is not fully reflected in the individual neighborhoods around the school.

Many of the important conversations around equity and inclusion that I’ve heard at RCF are centered around the divisions between the school’s immersion and non-immersion programs. Some of the conversations I’ve heard in favor of a school directory are also focussed on the challenge of communication and connection for immersion program families who do not live within the school’s boundary lines. I’d like to expand upon these conversations by making an argument for a school directory from the perspective of a neighborhood family.

When my now 5th grader was in Kindergarten we had a school directory (that I still have and use!) which served as the primary tool for us to get to know other families that attend our school. The directory allowed caregivers to help our children (and frankly, ourselves too) foster friendships with families that don’t live down the street, or that don’t meet at the same bus stop, by organizing play dates, sending invitations for birthday parties, helping each other with childcare, and coordinating participation in extracurricular activities. During the pandemic years when our children were not interacting at school, this directory was even more valuable as a way to connect with those that don’t live in our direct neighborhood.

The only other time we’ve had a school directory was for the 2022/23 school year, which was the year before my youngest joined RCF as a Kindergartener. As such, I don’t have contact information for his classmates' families, and it’s truly affected our ability to help foster those relationships.

My family has the benefit of being able to walk to school and interact with some other families at drop off and pickup. I have had the gift of time to volunteer at the school, and the benefit of speaking English as a first language. This makes participation in school activities, and a general understanding of our school and of our school system and communication pathways much easier for me than it is for some families for whom these things are not true. For some families who are new to the area, schools are one of the primary pathways for connection to resources, networks and integration into the community. Our school works very hard to provide resources, to foster inclusive and equitable practices, and to build community at school. To me, a school directory is another critical tool that our school can offer that allows that community building to continue and to exist for our students and their families outside of school-sponsored activities.

I feel really hopeful when I see my 5th grader and his cohort preparing for middle school, because I see friend groups that reflect, to some degree, the diversity of the school as a whole. He has arranged to play on a sports team with friends from a different neighborhood, and he has attended birthday parties with friends from many backgrounds because we as parents and caregivers were able to connect through the directory, having never met at school.

It’s been a long time since I was in middle school, but I know that it’s a time when social cliques and friend groups begin to solidify, and when the children themselves begin to be the ones to drive those social interactions without as much involvement from caregivers. I believe it to be true that patterns of segregation that exist in our neighborhoods inevitably repeat themselves in that context. The absence of a school directory, or similar mechanism which allows for the school to facilitate the sharing of family contact information, has an enormous impact around social exclusion and is a huge barrier to creating more integrated, inclusive communication and connected communities. I really see it perpetuating the silos that exist among different neighborhoods and hindering a lot of social interaction that carries on for our children as they head to middle school and high school. For this reason, I’m hoping that we can find a solution that both honors families’ rights to privacy, and allows the school to use this opportunity while our children are young to model and build connected, inclusive and strong communities.