The school community purposefully works together to ensure all students get what they need.
Elements of Family and Community Partnerships
These elements serve as guiding principles or visions of what “perfect” or “ideal” outcomes might look like.
“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.”
Margaret J. Wheatley
Crowdsource Workshops on Family and Community Partnerships
Past Crowdsource Recaps
Unearthing Our Potential: Building Stronger Schools Through Community Asset Mapping
Toolkit Resources for Family and Community Partnerships
Magnolia High School: Growing Their Community’s Future
Strategies for Equitable Family Engagement: Engaging Outside of the School Building
Checklist for Making Your Family-Community Partnership Work
Evaluate Systems & Structures That Support School Communities
Foster Students’ Sense of Self and Community: Develop a Community Service-Based Project Course
Address 6 Root Causes That Get in the Way of Fostering Community Engagement
Reflection Prompts for School Leaders
- How does our school or district define “family engagement”? What is our vision for what we want it to look like? How do we ensure that families, staff, and students have a voice in establishing this vision?
- Does our staff understand the importance of, and share our definition of, family and community engagement? Is our staff equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to support family engagement?
- What barriers exist to effective family engagement in our school or district? What might make a family feel unwelcome or uncared for at our school? How can we address that?
- Are we inviting feedback from all families in our district? If so, are we asking the right questions to truly understand their obstacles and challenges when it comes to engaging with their child’s education?
- How is our district addressing challenges such as childcare, English-language proficiency, non-traditional work hours, access to transportation, and other questions of equitable access?
Points of Emphasis
Intentional Community Engagement involves a purposeful and structured approach within the school, fostering robust family/parent partnerships to support students’ achievement of readiness-aligned outcomes. Resources are allocated to prioritize family and community engagement, reinforcing the readiness vision. Effective systems foster collaborations with community-based organizations, ensuring capable students attain aligned outcomes. Existing partnerships underscore the inherent value of collective efforts in serving all students effectively.
A school’s identity and purpose should be shaped by families as well as students and staff. If families can see themselves in the identity and purpose of the school, they will feel a connection and be more likely to engage and partner.
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This work by Inflexion is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
