Being able to successfully interact with parents and students when enforcing policies is essential. Establishing and expanding a repertoire of tools to set-up and manage expectations is a critical need to support yourself in these difficult situations. Here are some valuable ways you can create a paper trail of strong communication to navigate the enforcement of policies and procedures:
Informing students of policies on their audition and crew sign-ups: Before the show even begins, think about your most important policies and procedures that would affect a student’s ability to participate in the show. For us, the attendance policy for rehearsals and performances is critical. Our students sign-up for an audition or apply for a crew using Google Forms, and several of our questions on the sign-up focus on these policies. We use our audition sign-up form as the time students fill out the standard audition form you would use with questions like “What are your top three roles?” “Why would you be a good candidate for your top role?” Once we've compiled the spreadsheet of student responses, we then use the Google add-on AutoCrat to turn our spreadsheet of answers into individual audition sheets. Our stage managers print each individual audition sheet and we can sort, organize, and copy in advance for everyone on our audition panel (it's so nice when they are in order of students auditioning for audition panelists who don't know student's names!). We’ve also learned that you should have Google automatically capture the email addresses to prevent any email misspellings. Here are some ways we worded these policies as questions
students of policies as they accept their role: Once we have finished the casting and crew selection, we ask all company members to “accept their role” in Google Forms. We use the "accept their role" form as a way to capture basic contact information, but also how students would like their name spelled in the program, what t-shirt size to order, dietary needs, etc. This form ultimately gives us a really clean database for each show to work from. At the end of the “role acceptance form,” we ask students to re-answer our policy questions. This now gives the student two different times where they have acknowledged the policies and the potential consequences in writing. If students do not “accept their role” by the deadline, we may assume they are not participating and recast the role.
Informing students and guardians of policies in writing: Create a show contract that both students and guardians must sign in order for the student to participate. Here is an example of our show contract, which we call a production policy. On the production policy, make sure you have an area for a printed student name to be able to read whose contract is whose. We alphabetize our collected contracts by the last name and it goes in our show binder. If a student does not turn in a completed production policy by the deadline, the student is not allowed to participate in rehearsal (and missing rehearsals may result in removal from the production).
Informing students and guardians of policies verbally: At the beginning of each production, we host a “Meet the Company” night. We require all company members and their guardians to attend this meeting. We send out an invitation for this event based on the “role acceptance form,” and attached to the invitation is the necessary participation paperwork including our production policy. Sending the production policy out as part of the email invitation allows participants to come in with it already completed, but also provides another way you have released the policies and procedures in writing. At the meeting, we verbally present and discuss the policies and procedures, provide hard copies of all paperwork, and collect the necessary paperwork. We use Google Slides to accompany our presentations, and then after the meeting, we send the presentation home in email form to all company member and their guardians (again providing a written form of your policies and procedures). At “Meet the Company” night we have all our student designers present 2-minutes of their concepts and ideas for the production, and parents love coming to see that our work is really student created.
Publicly publishing the policies and procedures: We keep a link to our production policy available on our electronic callboard that company members and guardians can refer back to throughout the entire production.
We use these strategies, as our shows typically include 100+ students. You may not need every strategy, but we've learned the more ways you have it in writing, the cleaner your expectations are. What other ways do you help manage parent and student expectations around your policies and procedures?