Like most school principals, Carmen Macchia has a computer on his desk — and a mountain of e-mail waiting for him every morning.

But while Macchia, principal of Port Chester Middle School in New York, welcomes greetings from parents — and doesn't mind questions about homework assignments or lunch specials — he would rather see them in person when issues go deeper than chicken fingers and sloppy Joes.

Teachers, parents and administrators agree that while electronic correspondence can facilitate communication — and moves faster than the crumpled note that might stay in a child's backpack for days — e-mail has certain limitations when it comes to talking about students.

For Elizabeth Mayeri, a mother of two from White Plains, N.Y., e-mail proved especially useful this year when her 5-year-old son started kindergarten just as she was going off on a business trip.

"I was kind of giving the teacher a heads-up that I was traveling, just touching base and making sure that he was transitioning OK," she says, "because I was coming at it from a daycare mom perspective, where you have face time with the teacher every morning and every night."

Mayeri was happy to get a response the same day from the teacher but says that if issues grew more complicated, she would definitely step away from the keyboard.

"If it were a serious concern, it would be face to face," she says. "But I would probably use e-mail to schedule the face to face."

For Cathy Howard, a former teacher who lives in Scarsdale, N.Y., e-mail has its advantages. "Even though in the Scarsdale schools each teacher has a telephone, you don't want to be calling in the middle of class," says Howard, the mother of two middle-schoolers. "I taught for 20 years. You can't be answering the phone in the middle of class. You'd lose whatever control you have."

White Plains High School Principal Ivan Toper likes that e-mail provides easy access to teachers and administrators. "A major advantage for me is that I can usually give a parent a quick response to a situation or direct it to someone else in the school to address it," writes Toper in an e-mail message.

Teachers at Mohansic Elementary School in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., also communicate regularly with parents via e-mail, and find it particularly useful for quick questions, Principal Susan Berry says.

But for all its convenience, e-mail can have a downside.

"I think that with e-mail, you lose some of the nuances of the language, or of your personality," Berry says. "It's hard to convey humor through e-mail, and there's always that risk that the receiver interprets it differently than you intended it, even if you put in the exclamation marks or the little smiley faces."

For Berry, nothing can replace a real conversation. "We're such a people organization — school is all about people — that we like talking with people face to face. We like when parents are involved. We don't mind having a conversation with you. We call parents at night, we call parents on the weekend, just so we don't lose that human interaction. It's very important, especially in an elementary school."

But for parents who need to get information out quickly, like Rye Neck, N.Y., Parent Teacher Student Association president Kathy Kastenbaum, e-mail can be an invaluable tool. "We live on it," says Kastenbaum. "We totally communicate by e-mail, whether it's a question for my son's football coach, a teacher, the principal or the superintendent."

Yet no matter how many e-mail messages she sends out each day, Kastenbaum always writes them with care. "I am very respectful of e-mail," she says. "I would never send something to a teacher and send a blind carbon copy to someone else. You treat them with the same respect as you would in conversation."