Back-to-School Tips for Busy Parents

Besides a balanced lunch, organizing your child's back-to-school season is essential to a healthy start of the school year. Try these tips for a genius kickoff.

Organize Events and Logistics

Your school year will go much more smoothly if you set up effective processes now — and stick with them.

• Save time, money and miles by connecting with other parents to set up a carpool sign up system for school, sports teams and other extracurricular activities. Genius Tip: Use our Calendar Sync feature to get automatic reminders on your personal digital calendar of commitments.
• Be a superhero in your child's classroom. Suit up with these tips to be a life-saving classroom parent and help your teacher organize class parties, snacks, mystery readers and more. Genius Tip: Manage a classroom school supply wish list with a sign up.
• Fuel your child's sports team or afterschool club by organizing a snack sign up. The last thing you want is a bunch of antsy kids on the sidelines.

Other Useful Resources

Sending your child to the bus stop may never get easy, but preparing for the school year can be with a few simple tips.

• Avoid sleepy forgetfulness by establishing a good morning routine. Genius Tip: Prepare everything the night before.
• Think through clothing purchases, healthy meals and extracurricular scheduling with this back-to-school checklist.
• New to school? Read our advice of 25 things a kindergarten parent should know.

Be a Genius Organizer

Need some extra organizing firepower this school year? Check out our advanced planning tools.

• Keep your online sign ups current for participants by hiding past dates on your sign ups.
• Share the planning load by adding multiple administrators to manage your events.
• Eliminate advertisements by assigning no-ad licenses to your sign ups. (You'll thank us later.)

Parents have countless responsibilities throughout the fall season. Follow these tips ahead of time, and you'll breeze through back-to-school season.