Daily Email Complaint

A parent wrote a complaint about me to the district. She said that communication between school/home is insufficient and I should be sending daily emails for each student.

I do email often about any issues (behavior, grades, etc) but to email every single parent every single day just seems absurd to me. We do planners together as a class to write down our daily work and students are supposed to be able to explain what we did during the day to their parents. I send home letters for any major projects and as I teach fourth grade the daily work is often the same (math lesson from textbook, spelling words for the week, etc). I send all the parents a list of the spelling words five weeks at a time.

I just… am I the crazy one? I had 25 students one year and 27 is our max. Does this parent expect me to write 20+ emails every day just to say “we did the next math lesson” like? In what world is that a reasonable request? Why can’t she just talk her to her son each day?? Even if I wrote a generic email each day and mass sent it, that’s time I don’t have.

The real kicker is that her child came to me from another school barely able to read and as of the MOY standardized test he’s now high achieving. I worked with him individually every single day. Would she rather I didn’t work with him on his reading to instead email her? Every single one of my students is high/average achieving at this point. I didn’t have a single student performing low on their MOY reading test. But it’s just never good enough no matter what you do.

She said “these days, other teachers are sending daily emails and that’s the expectation.” Is that even true?

I’m on maternity leave in a few weeks so it’s hard to care enough to change but also I can’t stop thinking about it.