Not too long ago on the Admission Officer e-List, someone mentioned a struggle to retain students from the preschool/day care program into the school’s kindergarten classroom. While parents had not complained about the school’s care or education of their children, enrollment from the preK program to Kindergarten was incredibly low. If your school struggles with a similar retention issue between grade divisions, the solution may lie in your communication strategy.

Getting in touch with parents during a crisis—or even for regular updates or reminders!—can feel like you’re back in the 1800s, praying that your Pony Express courier hasn’t been trampled by stampeding bison herds. Thankfully, messages have come a long way in the past 200 years. We’ve borrowed some app suggestions from The Guardian and discovered more to give you a few dynamite tools to upgrade your parent communications.

In our last issue, we discussed the advantages of using cellphones during school hours. Proponents of the new policy say that cellphones provide increased educational opportunities for students—academically, personally, and emotionally—and improved lines of communication between students, parents, and administrators. Still, many detractors decry the new practice as disruptive and counter to educational goals. So this month, we’ll examine some of the argued points against personal cellphones use during school hours.

Who owns your teachers’ lesson plans—the teachers who write them, or the school that employs them? The answer might be more complicated than it seems, especially when teachers begin selling their classroom resources online for extra income.

Writing and researching are two of the most important skills students can learn before their college years. Yet, everywhere—from brief op-eds in Psychology Today to full-fledged debates in The Atlantic—discussions on our students’ poor literacy rates and declining academic integrity abound. Some demonize technology for the declining ability of students to compose a paragraph, but why not embrace the new tools available that grant access to some of English’s deeper mysteries? We’ve found eight great resources that—with a little guidance—could greatly enhance your students’ writing and research skills, both at your school and in their future communicative endeavors.

The “social” half of “social media” is more than the latest cat videos crowding your home feed or posting your child’s birthday party pictures in a public album for every second cousin to like. A lot of earnest, constructive conversation occurs on online platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, tackling everything from the latest news headlines to standardized testing. If you’re like to be a part of the latest conversations surrounding education and stay up-to-date on the latest best practices, we’ve curated a list of what we think are some of the most active and productive conversations online.

How do you build a rapport with students? Fairness, kindness, and constancy all build a young person’s trust in the adults he or she works with. One third grade teacher in Denver, Colorado, decided to offer an empathetic ear to her students—and the results were nothing short of heartwarming.

The death of Freddie Gray not only revitalized discussions of race relations in America, but also engendered the re-emergence of the “diversity dilemma” at private-independent schools around the country. Many schools work hard to promote diverse campuses, believing that a homogeneous community of staff and students will stagnate without infusions of fresh perspectives and diverse experiences. Still, diversity extends beyond race or income level. We found a TEDx talk given by education consultant Derrick Gay that brings a refreshing perspective to an old topic. Listen to his talk, and see if any of his experiences echo your own.

Once upon a time, school newsletters were little more than Xeroxed to-do lists for parents, reminding them of upcoming deadlines and maybe including the next week’s lunch menu. Since then, newsletters have evolved quite a bit, becoming a powerful piece of emailed or web-hosted marketing—if they’re properly formatted. To get you started, we’ve got a list of the must-do’s (and must-don’t’s!) that every successful school newsletter editor should check off.

As an Admission Officer, you’re asked to wear many different hats—one of them requires that you create original content for your various marketing initiatives. The demand for original content grows with each passing year, requiring dedication and consistent publishing. The temptation to “borrow” an idea or the turn of phrase from another article, thus saving you time to devote to other things, can be strong. Should you not cite or annotate properly, however, you could be held to the same standards as former Buzzfeed “viral politics” editor, Benny Johnson. Johnson’s case demonstrates that ignorance will not protect you or your school should you unwittingly copy someone else’s ideas. Understanding the many forms of plagiarism—and how to properly cite your sources—is crucial as you implement any content-creation strategy. We’ll go over how, exactly, Johnson plagiarized his content, and how you can still adopt online resources for your content without crossing the line from resource to plagiarist.