Three Lanes for Every School Email
Everyone at your school writes to the same inbox. Nobody sets the limits.
Part two of three.
Tuesday, 9:40 at night. Jenna is standing at the kitchen counter looking for a permission slip.
Her son needs it signed by morning. She knows it came by email, so she types the school’s name into the search bar and watches the results fill the screen. The lunch balance notice. The cross-country schedule, updated twice. The PTO fundraiser. A reminder about the reminder about picture day.
She has not opened one in weeks. She never decided that. It happened somewhere in September.
Her husband stopped reading them months ago. Last spring he told her, half joking, that school email was her department now.
Then she sees it, twelve days down. From the principal. An update about Mrs. Alvarez.
She already knows. Another mom told her at pickup this afternoon that Mrs. Alvarez is leaving in November, and Jenna stood there thinking, They didn’t even tell us.
They did. It is right there, unopened, between the lunch balance and the fundraiser.
That house used to have two readers. Now it has none.
You are one of many senders
The principal who wrote that email did everything right.
It still went unread. Most of the reason was not his.
Count who else wrote to Jenna this fall. The front office. Three teachers. A coach. The sports app. The tuition portal. The lunch system. The PTO.
Every one of those senders made a reasonable decision. No one sender is sending too much. Nobody is adding it up.
To Jenna, all of them are just the school. And it all spends the same thing: this family’s attention.
When families tune out, they tune out all of you
When MarketingSherpa asked 2,400 consumers why they unsubscribe from email, the top answer was too many emails in general. It ranked ahead of emails that were not relevant. And people who liked the organization gave much of the same reasons as the people who did not.
People are unsubscribing from email they know matters to them. Inbox overload causes them to listen to nobody, even though they know they are missing out.
Parents want to sort. They want to know which emails matter most. That is why Jenna kept reading long after her husband quit. He gave up on the volume last spring. She kept sorting, learning which names to open and which to skip.
But when the coach, the office and the principal all write about anything, at any time, the rules keep changing and there is no pattern to learn. Eventually even the one who sorts gives up and stops reading the school. Your emails get ignored along with the sports app, and the important ones have a much harder time breaking through.
You might be thinking the answer is to send more, since families keep saying they miss things. Look at when they say it. Almost always after the information already went out, and almost always because it was sitting under things they did not need.
Three sender lanes
Every email a family gets should come down one of three sender lanes.
Teachers write about my child. If it comes from a teacher, it is about my student. A grade, an assignment, something that happened in class. Nothing general.
The office writes about everyone. Schedules, forms, events, anything that applies to the whole school or a whole grade. If I turn it in at the front desk, it came from the office, not the classroom.
The principal writes when it matters. Four kinds of email, and only four. Urgent news, like a safety issue. Hard news families will not like. Vision, sent when nothing is wrong. And the personal note to one family about one student. Nothing routine and nothing automatic goes out under that name. (Two Emails Should Never Have Your Name on Them walks through all four, and the two kinds to give away.)
Coaches, the PTO and the apps ride the office lane.
Once families learn the lanes, the From line does the sorting for them. A teacher’s name means my kid. The office means logistics. Your name means this one matters.
Having these lanes have clear owners starts to solve the problem, but there's still one thing to address.
Put it on the table
Before anyone writes a rule, see what families are actually getting. Ask everyone who emails families to print what they sent in the last two weeks. Teachers, coaches, the office, you. Bring it to the conference room and lay it out on the table by day.
When my team ran this, the total mattered less than the timing. We discovered that new families were buried in their first few weeks. Families who had been with us for years barely heard a thing. What we needed was the right information going to the right people, sorted by who would actually find it useful.
So go through the pile together and ask two questions. Did each one come from the right lane? A teacher sending a schoolwide reminder, the office writing about one student, your name on picture day. Then who is getting too much, and who is getting too little?
Give every lane a limit
Don’t make one person approve every email. It's tempting, but becomes a bottleneck. Instead give each lane a target and a few clear practices, then let the people in that lane own it.
Something like this:
The principal. One email a week, plus urgent news when it happens.
Teachers. One classwide email a week, and only if it is needed. Everything else goes to one family about one student.
The office, including sports. Decide how many emails you are comfortable with families getting in a week, and how many you think they will actually read. Then send only what families need to know or act on.
Everyone who sends should know their target before they hit send.
If nobody sets the limits, families like Jenna’s will keep quietly closing the account. Give every sender a lane, and give every lane a limit.
Next week, part three takes on the other half: what to send, and what to hold for families to go get.
