Cold And Flu Season Communication At Your Child Care Center

Jill Purdy
January 2, 2020

One of the biggest challenges a childcare owner or director faces is managing and preventing the spread of illness inside your childcare facility.

Kids will be kids. They’ll sneeze without covering their mouths, touch their friend’s eyes without thinking twice and discover countless other ways to share germs that makes your task of managing cold and flu season seem impossible.

While that may seem true, there’s one thing childcare owners and directors can do to help prevent the spread of illness after it starts — communicate.

Have a communication plan in place to help combat cold and flu season

When there is a contagious cough or cold floating through your facility, you need to get the word out to your families as quickly as possible. Technology is in your favor with Jackrabbit Care, allowing you to cover many avenues easily to distribute the message. No need for paper signs on the front door and or classroom doors in your center.

With students throughout your facility and possibly sharing some of the same supplies, equipment, rooms, etc., it is best to get the message out to everyone who might have been affected. Being proactive in letting families know what kind of sickness is going around might be enough to keep it from spreading, affecting additional students or even your staff.

3 ways to communicate with parents at your childcare center

Instantaneously send an email to all families

Jackrabbit already hosts the contact information for your families, so why not use take advantage of that fact in your communication plan? For example, you can quickly and easily send emails to families who could have been exposed to a cold at your center.

Jackrabbit Care makes creating your email quick and easy too. You can make custom email templates for sending information – whether it pertains to cold and flu season or not – to parents and guardians in a few simple steps. This mass email function saves you time, helps you to increase accuracy of what you’re emailing and complete your communication plan.

Just think of the time-saving convenience of being able to send a mass email to all families for events such as holiday parades, book fairs and sharing cafeteria menus.

Create a login message on the Jackrabbit Care Parent Portal

Any login message in the Jackrabbit Care Parent Portal will display as a pop-up prior to parents and guardians logging in to the Parent Portal. The pre-login message is an informative roadblock that prevents parents from logging into their account before reading the important message about a recent illness.

If you’re tech savvy and want to get a little fancy, this text box supports HTML. WTH is HTML? Don’t worry, you can stick to a simple 500 character message to share news with families in the pre-login section of the Jackrabbit Care Parent Portal.

Add a message to the News and Announcements section of the Parent Portal

If you’re not a fan of pop-up messages, another option to communicate with parents during cold and flu season is through the News and Announcements section of the Jackrabbit Care Parent Portal.

Just like the login message, this message in the Parent Portal can be seen by all families, so privacy must be considered when sharing the news of who may have been exposed to an illness.

After parents login to their portal, they will get a notice that an important message has been added to their account. They can choose to view right away or go back to the message later if they’d prefer.

While this type of communication is super easy to distribute to all the families at your childcare facility, there’s less guarantee that the message will be seen immediately by parents and guardians. It is, after all, on them to actually look at the announcements tab of their Parent Portal.

Pro tip: Encourage your parents to look at these messages when you welcome the family to your facility.