18 Tips on Reducing and Resolving Conflict Between Parents and Schools

August 13, 2019

Positive and productive communication between school and home can be a big contributing factor to a student’s success. But even with the best of intentions on both sides, conflict sometimes happens—and when anger flares and arguments escalate, progress can come to a standstill.

In today’s post, we bring you 18 ideas for reducing and resolving conflict between families and school-based team members. Excerpted and adapted from Supporting the IEP Process by Nicholas R.M. Martin, these suggestions will help you keep the lines of communication open, collaborate effectively, and change conflict to consensus.

Nurture the dialogue between school and home

• Sponsor forums for school–parent dialogue. Try scheduling a monthly forum where parents, teachers, and other personnel can come together and share ideas. To meet the needs of diverse families, provide these opportunities in Spanish and other languages, or with interpretation.
• Create opportunities for positive interaction with parents. Build trust by making parents your allies and partners. Provide child care at meetings, help with transportation and scheduling issues, and show a willingness to be responsive to their specific needs.
• Coordinate a unified task force with parent resources. Find out who parents look to for guidance and network with those individuals or organizations. Assign both staff and parent representatives to specific focus groups that address areas of identified need, and encourage local advocacy and parent support groups to participate in the focus groups.

Help parents connect with advocates

• Provide district-sponsored training of parent advocates. Trainings should teach participants how to work collaboratively using principled negotiation, diplomacy, facilitation, mediation, and more.
• Maintain a recommended list of advocates. Advertise the list to parents to help connect them with advocates.
• Certify advocates. Encourage professional organizations to lobby the state legislature for legislations requiring professional advocates to complete training in the collaborative vision of IDEA.
• Develop an informative brochure. See this brochure for an example created by the Federation for Children with Special Needs.

Implement preventative training for staff

• Provide wide-scale training. Advocate for school personnel to be trained in collaboration, diplomacy, effective communication, and conflict resolution.
• Connect leaders with training. If you’re a principal, especially a newly hired one, undergoing collaboration and conflict prevention training will help you prepare for your leadership role.
• Train staff using online programs. Offer accessible and efficient ways to teach all team members how to work collaboratively toward consensus.

Give parents training in collaborative problem-solving

• Create a guide for parents. Develop a quick-guide that shows parents what to do if they’re unhappy with an aspect of their child’s education plan.
• Make training convenient. Offer training programs at convenient meeting places and in multiple languages.
• Develop and promote parent training videos. Have representatives from family resource centers explain the benefits of cooperative problem solving.

Advocate for collaborative means of dispute resolution

When disputes do arise…

• Encourage state-provided mediation. District personnel should be trained on how to use the mediation process for healing and building trust.
• Use facilitators at resolution meetings. Develop local mediation at a less formal level using trained local dispute resolution center mediators.
• Create and promote short Internet infomercials. Focus on mediation, facilitation, and other alternative dispute resolution options available in your district.
• Invite speakers to come to your school. Talk to teachers and staff about using facilitators and collaborating to resolve disputes.

What are your most effective strategies for resolving conflict between schools and families? Do you have a suggestion of your own to add?