In a recent episode of The Table, I sat down with Ryan Ermeling, founder of Parent Pulse, to talk about something that keeps many school leaders up at night: parent feedback. Since launching his organization in 2022, Ryan has worked with nearly 300 private and independent schools to help them rethink how they collect, understand, and act on feedback from families. What started as a conversation about survey tools quickly became a much deeper discussion about trust, culture, and what it means to truly listen.
If you’ve ever felt a knot in your stomach when a parent email lands in your inbox, or if your school collects feedback but isn’t sure what to do with it, this one’s for you.
The Reality of “Post-Traumatic Feedback Disorder”
Ryan introduced me to a term that made me laugh out loud because it felt so painfully accurate: PTFD, or Post-Traumatic Feedback Disorder. Every school leader he talks to has some level of it. For some, it’s more severe than others, but the apprehension is real.
This apprehension stems from past experiences. The squeaky wheel. The parking lot conversations. What Ryan calls “the parking lot mafia,” those informal groups of parents who gather and gossip, sometimes producing feedback that doesn’t feel particularly healthy or productive. These experiences color how school leaders view feedback overall, creating a tentative, defensive stance rather than an open, engaged one.
The challenge is that this defensive posture makes it harder to build the kind of trust-based relationships that actually strengthen school communities. When we approach feedback from a place of fear, we miss the opportunity to turn it into something generative.
Image 1 suggestion (place here): A school administrator thoughtfully reviewing feedback at their desk, looking engaged rather than stressed
What’s Changed About Parent Expectations
Ryan pointed to two major shifts that have made parent feedback feel more emotionally charged in recent years.
First, we’ve become accustomed to instant responses in nearly every other area of our lives. When we order something online, we get real-time tracking. When we have a question, we expect immediate answers. That expectation has naturally translated into schools. Parents increasingly expect the same level of responsiveness and transparency from their child’s school that they get from every other service provider.
Second, school choice has fundamentally changed the dynamic in many communities. Parents have more options than ever before, and in states where school choice is expanding, those state dollars can move to a different school if families aren’t satisfied. This creates a sense of heightened competition and raises the stakes around feedback. If schools don’t respond meaningfully, families know there’s another option down the road.
This isn’t about schools becoming customer service centers. But it does require us to acknowledge that parent expectations have shifted, and our feedback systems need to evolve accordingly.
The Feedback Loop: Listen, Engage, Act
Ryan reframed how we should think about feedback, moving from isolated moments to an ongoing loop with three key phases: listen, engage, act.
Interestingly, he’s moved away from the word “measure” to “listen” because measuring gives the impression of just dipping your toe in the water to take the temperature. Listening is about truly ingesting and processing what you’re hearing.
Most schools get stuck in the listening phase. It’s not too difficult to collect feedback anymore. The real challenges are being both systematic and consistent in how you listen, and then actually doing something with what you hear.
Where Schools Stall
Schools often fail to close the loop by engaging with their community about what they’ve heard. How often do we go back to families and say, “Here’s what we’re hearing. Here are the things we’re thinking about. Here’s what we’re going to follow up on.” And then, critically, “Here are some meaningful things we’re going to do”?
Ryan shared that schools sometimes get hung up before taking action because they feel the action has to be massive and perfect. But it doesn’t. Sometimes the low-hanging fruit can be incredibly impactful.
He told me about a school in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where a parent mentioned in a survey that their 4-year-old never got milk with lunch during extended care. The school administrator walked down to the lunchroom, asked if there was any reason milk wasn’t provided, and learned the staff simply didn’t know it was important. They started providing milk the next day.
When the school shared this story with their whole community as an example of feedback informing action, it sent a powerful signal. Even though the change affected a very small portion of families, it demonstrated that the school was genuinely listening and looking for meaningful ways to improve the experience.
The Problem with Annual Surveys
One of Ryan’s most compelling arguments was about the limitations of the traditional annual survey approach. When schools blast out a single survey at a single moment in time, they run into several problems.
Timing bias means that whatever happened most recently colors everything. If a family had a frustrating experience the week before the survey, that’s what they’re thinking about when they respond. Conversely, if things have been going smoothly lately, they might forget earlier challenges.
Recency bias creates blind spots. Schools can’t capture the trajectory of the school year or monitor how changes are being received over time.
The vacuum effect happens when families share feedback but never hear back. When you don’t engage with what you’ve collected, people stop giving feedback. Why would they continue sharing if it disappears into a void?
Ryan’s solution through Parent Pulse is a drip process in which surveys are sent automatically throughout the year. This creates a living, breathing feedback mechanism that captures ongoing sentiment rather than a single snapshot.
Image 2 suggestion (place here): A calendar or timeline showing continuous feedback collection throughout the school year, not just one annual survey
The Anonymous Feedback Dilemma
Schools have a complicated relationship with anonymous feedback. On one hand, anonymity typically yields more honest responses and higher participation rates. On the other hand, you often can’t do anything meaningful with anonymous feedback because you can’t follow up.
Ryan described how Parent Pulse addressed this by enabling two-way engagement even with anonymous respondents. If someone shares something concerning or inaccurate, schools can respond and engage in dialogue while the respondent remains anonymous. This transforms a survey tool into an engagement tool, creating that safety net for families while still allowing schools to respond.
This matters because sometimes you need to set the record straight when information isn’t accurate, and sometimes you need to follow up on something genuinely concerning. Being able to do that without compromising anonymity changes the entire dynamic.
The Re-Enrollment Connection
We’re entering re-enrollment season, and Ryan noted that consistent feedback systems naturally support retention efforts. Some schools use feedback tools more directly during re-enrollment windows, asking specific questions about likelihood to return and following up with families who express concerns.
But the more powerful approach is building retention into everyday practice. When you consistently receive feedback, you can address issues earlier in the year that you weren’t aware of. You can have conversations with families before small frustrations become enrollment-threatening problems.
This proactive approach shifts the entire relationship from reactive problem-solving to ongoing partnership.
Feedback and Belonging
At its core, this conversation isn’t really about feedback at all. It’s about relationships and belonging.
When schools handle feedback well, it changes the culture from “us and them” to “we.” It empowers parents, teachers, and students to feel they have a stake of ownership in the school community. This isn’t about “the customer is always right” or acting on everything you hear. It’s about developing a consistent, healthy feedback loop where you listen, engage, and act in ways that make people feel heard and valued.
Ryan emphasized that people want to feel safe in their communities, and that safety comes from feeling heard and valued. This is true on a fundamental psychological level. When we create systems that genuinely incorporate people’s voices, we’re not just collecting data. We’re building trust and strengthening community bonds.
Image 3 suggestion (place here): Diverse group of parents and school staff in conversation, depicting collaborative engagement
The One Thing to Change
I asked Ryan what schools should change if they could only change one thing about their approach to parent feedback. His answer was simple but profound: build a system.
Whether that system is a tool like Parent Pulse or something you design yourself (three focus groups a year, two town halls, one comprehensive survey), what matters is that it’s systematic. Create a plan that prescribes how it’s going to work, when it’s going to work, and what you’re going to do with it.
Systems work because you don’t have to think about them. The approach is already prescribed. Where schools fail is when feedback becomes an afterthought, something reactive and ad hoc. When you systematize your approach, you dramatically increase the likelihood of execution and actually creating benefits from the process.
Moving Forward
The schools that thrive aren’t the ones that avoid parent feedback or treat it as a necessary evil. They’re the ones that lean into it, building systematic approaches that turn feedback into genuine engagement and community building.
This requires moving past PTFD and reconsidering what feedback is really for. It’s not primarily about measuring satisfaction or defending decisions. It’s about creating ongoing dialogue that makes everyone feel they’re part of something larger than themselves.
If your current approach to parent feedback feels reactive, defensive, or stuck, consider what one systematic change you could make. Could you establish regular listening posts throughout the year instead of one annual survey? Could you commit to publicly sharing what you’re hearing and how it’s informing decisions? Could you create a simple system for responding to concerns before they escalate?
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s progress. And sometimes, like that school in Wisconsin discovered, progress looks like making sure the 4-year-olds get milk with their lunch. Small actions that signal something much larger: we’re listening, we care, and we’re in this together.
