School asking parents to only email teachers during working hours

[cautiouscovidity]

We've had a message from DCs' (primary) school respectfully asking parents to only email the head and class teachers between 8:30-5:30 on school days and not during the evenings / weekends / holidays, for staff well-being reasons (they deserve protected downtime etc.).
AIBU to think that this is ridiculous? I work in a job where I don't always have access to a phone / computer during the working day and so, on the rare occasion that I need to contact a teacher, I tend to email in the evening at home or first thing before I get ready to leave. Obviously I don't expect them to reply out of working hours, or even to read it there and then, but I had never considered that it would be intrusive. In my job I get loads of emails at all times of the day and night and they just sit in my inbox until I am working!
Surely if it's impacting on their downtime so much, then they should just not check their emails in the evening and turn off notifications etc.

I ask a few people and they don’t think you should be emailing them after certain hours either , it is very hard to turn it off mentally. If You have a anxious parent emailing at 3am , you naturally want to check to see if everyone is ok. It’s hard to turn that off when you care about your students and people in general.

@blueberrypie0112

I ask a few people and they don’t think you should be emailing them after certain hours either , it is very hard to turn it off mentally. If You have a anxious parent emailing at 3am , you naturally want to check to see if everyone is ok. It’s hard to turn that off when you care about your students and people in general.

What I mean, the teacher start worrying why a parent email at 3am , are they anxious? Frustrated? they don’t want the parents take it out on their kids. Then they check it and find out it is nothing

@FelicisNox

YABU.

It's not about you managing anyone else's downtime and your IT issues are not their problem.

In the age of smartphones I don't believe for one minute that you don't have access to emails or Internet (unless you literally live in the middle of nowhere with zero signal) after 5pm or on a weekend.

If you can post on MN at all hours of the day and night you can send a time appropriate email.

If you REALLY can't then drop them an email saying: thank you for this information due to the following reasons this will not be possible but feel free to respond when possible.

I DO have access to emails after 5 pm (I.e the evenings and weekends); my OP said that they don't want us contacting them before 8:30 and after 5:30. On a workday this is often impossible for me - I cannot always access emails at work - and I quite often don't get home until 5:30 or later and we leave before 8:30. I know I'm not alone, other parents have jobs where they can't access their phones or use company IT for personal use.

But don't you have school office email that you can send out of hours, OP?
Your OP says you can't send email to teachers or HT out of hours. It doesn't say don't send it to school office out of hours.

If you do that, then school office can forward it to the teachers and HT, I see no problem. I just can't see the reason why you need to contact the teacher or HT directly so often.

I started to doubt if parents like OP may be the reason why school decided to enforce such a rule in the first place.

@blueberrypie0112

I ask a few people and they don’t think you should be emailing them after certain hours either , it is very hard to turn it off mentally. If You have a anxious parent emailing at 3am , you naturally want to check to see if everyone is ok. It’s hard to turn that off when you care about your students and people in general.

The problem here, isn't the anxious parent emailing at 3am, it's the fact that the teacher feels the need to check every time their phone pings. Stop texts/ emails/ alerts coming through at night as that's not healthy. Don't take your phone to bed, if you can't resist checking it.

Set yourself boundary's - that's what's lacking and will cause stress, not someone sending an email late at night. Have clear boundary's for work/home life. Take the ownership and say no to work emails in your own time instead of hoping no one sends any. Turn phones/devices off. Or at least use the phone setting to decide what notifications come through. At bedtime set your device to only allow calls/texts from certain contacts and then you won't get woken by the ping of a notification.

You can't control other people's actions here, but you can't control your own.

Well put tigger1001

@SmileEachDay

If a teacher can get so stressed by getting an email out of hours - unable to self time manage, ignore, or read the subject line - in case it is a missing child! - then is it any wonder they find teaching so stressful and are leaving in droves! holdingpattern

So, if I’m accessing my emails on Sunday in order to plan lessons and there are a further 4 emails from a parent who started baying for my blood at 6ish on Friday as I logged off...

Even without reading them, I know they are problematic and are going to take a huge amount of time to sort out.

Mainly, parents just put their child’s name in the subject heading. The contents could be anything from “X doesn’t know how to do the homework” to “You’re a bitch who is picking on my daughter and I’m going to the press”

How is any of that stress my fault?

Thanks for the heads up about parents just putting their dcs name in and not the issue. I did this on asking if there was any work dd should be doing when we were isolating a couple of weeks ago. Nb the school office staff told me to contact them all directly - as dd was felt too embarrassed to do it.... Next time, not wanting to potentially scare / upset her teachers, I will ensure the heading is more specific.

Set yourself boundary's - that's what's lacking and will cause stress, not someone sending an email late at night. Have clear boundary's for work/home life.

Exactly

Settling boundaries and instilling discipline is your own responsibility, not something you foist on to someone else.

Sending an email at 3am is not a problem. If you open it (in the middle of the night 😳) and let it bother you, that’s entirely on you and entirely within your ability to change.

If a parent demands an immediate response at 3am then they’re obviously a loon and need to be told as much.

Next time, not wanting to potentially scare / upset her teachers, I will ensure the heading is more specific

That’s a really helpful thing to do. It means I can prioritise quickly - or in some cases just forward on to the appropriate person.

SmileEachDay

Yes, thanks. It just didn’t occur to me just how often parents write to teachers!

Imagine if we all could email, police, nurses, social workers at our whim.

We can email the clinical specialist nurses and social workers at our whim. It’s the main method of communication with social workers here afaik! They seem to be out, visiting parents most of the time.

I wouldn’t want to email the police, as I’d only want to report an emergency or crime going on, when you need an immediate response.

I really don’t know how schools expect parents to be able to write personal emails, while they are at work?

When I went to school we were starting to use a software for managing school. Cause I'm over 30 and it was new we used it for lessons schedules, choosing electives and checking grades. But now it is used for communicating between school and home, notifications, homework, absences, grades, upcoming tests etc. Obviously since it is like email it wouldn't soĺve the problem since if the teacher goes there, they will see the messages but maybe there would be less questions since the info is available to the parents.

Here are links to the programme.
www.hel.fi/helsinki/en/childhood-and-education/comprehensive/cooperation/wilma/

help.starsoft.fi/indexa61f.html?q=node/14368

Child has been off all week unauthorised with no contact or reason from parents- this morning find a email from parents requesting all the lessons he has missed so he won't be behind too much. They want this by lunchtime as they have plans this afternoon

I won't be replying until tomorrow morning

What will you be replying @practicallyperfectwithprosecco? I can imagine what you want to reply

practicallyperfectwithprosecco

I would forward that to whoever deals with attendance.

Blimey, @practicallyperfectwithprosecco!!!

Perfect example of why teachers should not open emails at weekends! But well done you for not replying (PLEASE share with us what you send!!! )

That made me laugh. Why can't they just tell their staff to only respond to emails in working hours?

When mail is switched off, it does seem to make many parents reflect on the importance of the message. So instead of lots of "when is half term", they will refer to the calendar on the school website.

We suspect it was a term time holiday

I'm going to thank the parents for offering to do the catch up work with them ( saves me having to reteach multiplying decimals and modal verbs) then I will upload all the work missed onto google classroom for them - unfortunately I won't be providing recorded lessons as being unaware child was going to be off I didn't have time to prepare these.

I'm pretty confident the work won't get done.

@Maireas Switching the mail off or having an out of office reply is fine. No reasonable person would expect a teacher to be on call 24-7 (or any time out of office hours) even to deal with serious concerns. What I don't think works is asking every other person to remember what time they work and only email within those hours.

[quote BuddyRun]@MrsTerryPratchett Because it would take each parent literally ten seconds whereas teachers get dozens of emails all evening with no way to know which ones are urgent and which ones aren't.
For example, if a teacher gets 20 emails every evening, they have to read all of them to find the one urgent one that says Bobby has tested covid positive. They need to act on that out of hours to inform their close contacts not to come into school the next morning. If the parents only emailed during working hours except the one urgent email, then the teacher would read the one urgent email.
So, if parents can't be bothered to spend ten seconds setting up a delayed send, teachers are forced to either read every email out of hours or miss important emails. That's why parents should stop being lazy.[/quote]
This. 100x this.

@practicallyperfectwithprosecco. I wouldn’t respond to that email today. Forward it to the attendance officer in the morning

I am so chuckling at the poster saying for the teachers to have boundaries - completely missing the point that asking parent not to email out of hours IS EXACTLY what they’re doing - setting boundaries. How can some posters be so entitled?

@cautiouscovidity

We've had a message from DCs' (primary) school respectfully asking parents to only email the head and class teachers between 8:30-5:30 on school days and not during the evenings / weekends / holidays, for staff well-being reasons (they deserve protected downtime etc.). AIBU to think that this is ridiculous? I work in a job where I don't always have access to a phone / computer during the working day and so, on the rare occasion that I need to contact a teacher, I tend to email in the evening at home or first thing before I get ready to leave. Obviously I don't expect them to reply out of working hours, or even to read it there and then, but I had never considered that it would be intrusive. In my job I get loads of emails at all times of the day and night and they just sit in my inbox until I am working! Surely if it's impacting on their downtime so much, then they should just not check their emails in the evening and turn off notifications etc.

Posted Fri 09-Oct-20 10:43:09

You realise that you had access to the internet during working hours to read the school's email and then to post this, don't you?

@MitziK Maybe RTFT before being so superior. OP already explained being off work.