The Hidden Back-To-School Supply Parents Can't Buy: More Bandwidth

The school year hasn’t started yet, but Utah mother Heidi Costello is already logging in. Before anyone has even stepped into a classroom, she’s swiping between platforms for transportation updates, calendars, teacher messages, and digital forms. “I feel it’s easier to stay engaged,” Costello says, “as long as you can keep up with the ever-changing technology they use.”

With three sons attending different schools, staying informed has become as much about remembering where to look, and which password to use, as understanding the information itself.

Ask any parent, and you’ll get the same answer: School communication has transformed dramatically over the past two decades. And Costello isn’t alone in finding that technology, when utilized effectively, makes it easier to stay engaged. A 2026 systematic review analyzing over 50 studies on technology-mediated parent-school communication found that parents generally viewed digital tools as convenient and beneficial, while also reporting concerns about overcommunication and navigating multiple platforms.

But that convenience has a flip side, as described by Ohio mother Megan Volk, who says helping her son join his school’s color guard became an exercise in information archaeology. A paper flyer led to QR codes, which led to multiple pages within the Band app, an information session, a PowerPoint with more QR codes, and a separate email address for questions. Even figuring out where to pick him up after practice wasn’t always clear. “The mental map I needed to use to find information was, for lack of a better word, bonkers,” she says. “It was nuts.”

As families head back to school, conversations about classrooms and homework are increasingly accompanied by another familiar refrain: Did that come through an app, email, or the parent portal?

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When La Toya Woods’ oldest daughter started school, the Milwaukee mother says staying informed mostly meant checking the backpack for paper flyers and the weekly newsletter. Today, she says, parents are expected to navigate “multiple platforms, each with its own login, notifications, and way of sharing information.”

Volk echoes that sentiment, saying school communication often feels like a scavenger hunt. She still finds herself retracing her steps from app to app every time a new message arrives from school, asking herself: “Did I see that message in Cut-Time? Did I get that notification by email, text, or TalkingPoints? Was that schedule in the school newsletter? How do I get back to that?”

Volk’s experience reflects a broader trend. A 2025 survey conducted by Cornerstone Communications in partnership with Edsby found that schools without a unified platform often ask families to navigate 10 to 15 apps, while a separate national survey found more than two-thirds of districts rely on five to six channels to reach parents.

For some families, participation also depends on having the technology to access those systems. Allie Davis, a mother of two in Tennessee, says her daughters’ public school relied almost exclusively on an app, creating barriers for parents without smartphones, who had to find another way to access messages.

“The systems have helped some kinds of information get out there,” says Dr. Steven Sheldon, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education and co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships, “but they've put up a wall between families and other information that's more closely tied to their child's learning.”

Even tech-savvy parents feel the strain. “I’m technologically literate...and I still get confused,” Volk says. “I can’t imagine what this is like for our English language learners and their families.”

“The systems are not intuitive to everybody,” adds Sheldon. Families with different levels of digital literacy, educational backgrounds, or English proficiency may experience those systems very differently. “You have to assume that it is accessible not just for the well-educated, highly literate families,” says Sheldon, “but for families whose first language isn't necessarily English.”

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Parents' focus, too, has become a limited resource. “We are competing for families’ time and attention,” says Brian Prybil, Deputy Superintendent of Moline Coal Valley School District in Illinois. “More communication does not automatically create more trust. Better communication does.”

Keeping up takes bandwidth, and every notification and reminder asks parents to spend a little more of it. “The online systems are really not helping students learn,” adds Sheldon, “they're just sort of billboards of information. Parents become the advocate and the manager. They're the ones who have to find the information and make sense of it."

Prybil compares today’s communication landscape to the overflowing teacher mailboxes schools once relied on. “When it became overloaded, you almost became immune to it,” he says. “The same thing can happen now with inboxes, apps, portals, and phone notifications.”

For parents, that means attention becomes harder to direct. “When everything is important,” Prybil adds, “nothing feels important.” Instead of triaging genuine priorities, parents are left sorting through a flood of pings and push notifications with no clear sense of what's urgent and what can wait.

And that sense of constant, ambiguous urgency can have unintended consequences. A study examining teacher-parent messaging groups found that information overload and irrelevant messages significantly increased communication fatigue, which in turn was associated with a greater intention to mute notifications or leave the group altogether. “In some ways,” Woods says, “having more options has actually made it harder to know where to look and easier to miss important information.”

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Schools, though, are often just trying to cover their bases. For many educators, redundancy feels like the safer bet. “As a teacher, you don’t want to be criticized for not communicating enough," says Ohio middle school teacher Erin Beers. “It almost feels like overcommunicating is safer.” That defensive instinct has only grown since the pandemic, when schools rapidly adopted new communication tools, and, as Florida-based former teacher and principal Marlee Strawn observed, parents’ expectations shifted right along with them.

Families who once received occasional updates suddenly had to keep up with messages from six, seven, sometimes eight teachers, each with a different style and expectations. “Imagine going to your job and having seven different bosses with seven different expectations,” Strawn says, “It would be incredibly difficult.”

Schools often repeat important information because they know families don’t all receive it the same way. Florida mother and PTO president, Jennifer Grosneck, says her son’s school sends announcements home through a trio of approaches. “When we combine these—messages sent home, highlighted on the weekly call, and posted on our socials—we generally see the best response,” she says.

“The strongest partnership programs,” according to leading researcher Dr. Joyce Epstein, professor of education and director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University, “rarely, if ever, send messages just one way.” She says that kind of repetition is intentional, and agrees schools shouldn’t rely on a single communication channel because different families access information in different ways.

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For decades, researcher Dr. Epstein has argued that communication isn't the goal of family engagement, partnership is.

In her framework for school, family, and community partnerships, communication is one of six types of involvement that help schools and families work together to support students. Rather than expecting every family to adapt to the same system, Epstein argues that schools should first understand how families want to receive information and use various approaches to reach them.

Her longtime collaborator, Dr. Sheldon, doesn’t believe schools have a communication problem so much as a relationship problem. “It’s still about informing,” he says, “not about building relationships.”

Paper flyers gave way to robocalls, emails, parent portals, apps, and text messages. The tools changed, Sheldon argues, but the goal often didn’t.

“What families want to know is how their kids are doing,” he says, including whether they’re meeting expectations, where they’re struggling, and what kind of support would help. Instead, parents often receive “very general and generic information,” while the updates they actually want are specific to their own child.

But for Sheldon, the concern is when parents have been “bombarded three times with one message,” and whether that can realistically be considered genuine communication or simply the same message repeated.

Technology has made it easier to distribute information, Sheldon says, but schools haven’t fully embraced its potential to foster conversation with families. “The culture of schools,” he says, “hasn’t shifted to a mindset that is really embracing technology as a way of doing two-way communication.”

Dr. Kara Stern, Director of Education at SchoolStatus, puts it simply: “Family communication,” she says, “is an exercise in relationship and trust-building, not compliance.” But, adds Sheldon, meaningful communication and trust-building has to evolve from two-way communication, not one-way broadcasting.

Ultimately, Sheldon argues, schools should think less about delivering information and more about what families are expected to do with it. Some communication exists to meet compliance requirements, some to keep parents informed, and other messages help families understand how their child is doing or support learning at home. “This is where we need more conversations,” he says.

The promise of ever-evolving technology, especially as schools embraced hybrid tools after the pandemic, was simpler, more seamless communication. More apps and reminders were supposed to make information-sharing easier. Instead, they’ve often given families more places to look. As schools continue investing in new ways to reach parents, families are still left to find the time and mental bandwidth for one more notification, one more login, and one more thing to remember.

Molly Wadzeck is a freelance writer and mother of three. Born and raised in Waco, Texas, she moved to the Finger Lakes region of New York, where she worked in animal rescue and welfare for many years. She writes essays and poems about feminism, mental health, parenting, pop culture, and politics. She is usually late because she stopped to pet a dog. She tweets at @mollywadzeck.