Trust is built before you ask for it
I trust an organization when I see transparency.
I need to understand its mission. I need to align with its value proposition. And I need to trust that the organization will do what is best for both me and my child.
That means more than giving me access to information.
I need to understand the information for myself and for my child.
Some new research gives us a reason to take those seemingly small interactions more seriously.
In September 2026, the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) and Qualtrics released Strengthening Trust Through a Better K-12 Customer Experience. Their national survey of school communication professionals looked at the everyday experiences families and community members have with districts: calling the main office, completing registration, trying to find information on a website, asking a transportation question or simply figuring out who owns the next step.
But here’s the part that caught my attention.
Sixty-three percent said their district places a high or very high priority on intentionally creating positive experiences for external audiences. Only 38 percent said their district was very or extremely effective at providing those experiences consistently.
There is a difference between saying something is a priority and designing a system that makes it one.
The study is relatively small—145 respondents—and NSPRA appropriately describes the findings as directional rather than representative of every school district. But the gap it identifies is worth paying attention to.
Because those small interactions matter.
When I ask a question, does somebody respond?
When something changes, does someone explain why?
When I don’t understand, is there somewhere I can go without feeling like I am bothering somebody?
When the school says one thing, does its behavior match?
Trust isn’t created during one family engagement event. It accumulates through experiences.
So does distrust.
Who owns the family’s experience?
Think about how many different parts of a school system a family might have to navigate.
Teachers. Attendance. Counselors. Transportation. Special education. English learner services. The nurse. Administration. Technology platforms.
A family experiences all of this as the school.
The school system experiences it as departments.
That’s a problem.
Because who owns the family’s journey across all of them?
If I don’t know who to contact, whose problem is that?
If one department tells me to call another and that department sends me somewhere else, who notices?
If I have to explain the same situation four times to four different people, does anyone see that as a systems problem?
Or is the burden simply placed on me to figure out how the organization works?
Interestingly, the NSPRA/Qualtrics research found that many of the barriers to creating consistent experiences are operational: limited capacity or time, unclear responsibility for reinforcing expectations, school-level autonomy, a lack of documented expectations, and limited training or professional development.
That matters.
Because what families experience as a communication problem may actually be an organizational design problem.
We talk about family engagement as though the family is the variable we need to change.
Maybe sometimes the system is the variable.
Maybe friction is data
When a family can’t figure out who to contact, that’s data.
When parents repeatedly ask the same question, that’s data.
When families don’t attend a meeting scheduled during their workday, that’s data.
When people receive information but don’t understand what to do next, that’s data.
When a parent stops asking questions because getting an answer has become too difficult, that’s data too.
We shouldn’t automatically interpret every one of those moments as evidence that families are disengaged.
Maybe they’re telling us something about the system we’ve designed.
The NSPRA/Qualtrics report makes a similar point. School communicators may see recurring questions and points of confusion across inboxes, calls, website searches, comments and community feedback. One complaint might be isolated. Repeated confusion around the same process, form or contact point can signal something systemic.
I think that’s important because friction is often treated as an individual inconvenience.
What if we treated repeated friction as systems data instead?
So before asking how we get families to engage more, I think there’s another question worth asking:
Where does dealing with our school become unnecessarily hard?
Then follow the family through it.
Don’t explain the system to them.
Don’t defend why the process exists.
Don’t immediately build another program.
Watch.
Listen.
And treat the friction as information.
Because schools can say they want family trust.
The harder question is whether we’ve designed an everyday experience that deserves it.