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From surveying stakeholders to sharing a basketball court, one school district superintendent shares best practices for forging an ongoing bond between her district and her city.

Like every school district in America, mine—Poquoson City Public Schools in Virginia—is preparing for summer break. While summer is a great excuse to recharge and spend time with family, it’s important to engage parents and families in meaningful conversations while school is out.

Ours is a small district in a city of 12,000, so we don’t have a staff to focus on community engagement. I’m the superintendent and the PR person for the division. As we wind down one school year and plan for the next, it’s helpful to think creatively about how we can continue to meet the needs of our community.

Here are six strategies that work for me. With any luck, they’ll work for you, too.

1) Take stock with surveys.

Three years ago, we developed a six-year strategic plan for our school division. To get input on the development of that plan, we used Engage, a cloud-based survey and decision-making tool from K12Insight, to gather thoughts and ideas from parents, community members, teachers, students, and staff.

Now, each spring we conduct follow-up surveys to see if we’re actually making progress on the performance indicators spelled out in that plan. Over the course of the summer, we’re able to digest the data and develop proposed next steps so we can present those ideas to our board in the fall when school opens up.

2) Set up an always-on listening station.

If our parents and students or other community members have questions or concerns about our schools and they want an answer fast, they can reach out to us using Let’s Talk! Designed to complement the deep insights from our community surveys, the online portal is accessible on our district website and lets us keep those lines of communication open throughout the year. Not having a PR staff makes it difficult to respond to every person, especially during the summer. Let’s Talk! makes my job easier by automatically routing questions to the right team member to ensure a prompt response. The portal lets community members pick from several “interest areas” relevant to ongoing school programs or policies. This summer, we plan to add topics to address questions about the upcoming school.

3) Make the most of your media.

In addition to using our own tools, we send weekly “tip sheets” to newspapers and media outlets. These may be pictures with captions explaining specific school programs or informational press releases for editors to either publish or follow up on with us.

We also use television. We have a public broadcasting station. It’s WHRO in Norfolk, and it’s actually owned by 18 school divisions. This gives us the chance to publicly address different programs in our schools. We link the content to our website and push it out there as well.

4) Get a boost from your city.

We work closely with our city government during the summer. I often ask our friends at City Hall to post our content to their website and social media channels. That way, we can reach community members who might not have students enrolled in our schools but who still want to know what’s happening at our facilities during the summer.

5) Put in some face time.

I try to get out there and be visible in the summer months, so that people are comfortable coming up to me and saying, “Hey, by the way, I saw this in the paper. Can you explain it to me more?” That personal, one-on-one interaction makes a huge difference.

In the same spirit, I do presentations to civic groups. The retired members of our community tend to be very involved in these meetings. Seeing and hearing me in person helps them stay connected with the division throughout the year.

6) Keep your doors open.

We go out into the community during the summer, but we also invite the community into our schools. We run a summer school program, so we have kids in our buildings all year round. Community groups use some of our fields during the summer, so that’s another way to maintain a positive connection between community members and the school division. Neighbors can jog on the track or join basketball leagues that use our gym, for example.

Each of these strategies keeps our community engaged throughout the school year. We recently completed our most recent spring survey. I’m looking forward to digging into that data as we get into the summer and seeing what we can do to improve our school division for our students and families when we kick off classes again in the fall.