How to Strengthen School-Family Partnerships With Proven Strategies

“How many of you have been teachers?” Karen Mapp asked an audience at the 2024 National Community Schools and Family Engagement Conference. Nearly every hand went into the air. But then came her next question: “How many of you in your pre-service training to be a teacher or an educator had a full course on family engagement?” Only one hand went up.

Most educators do not have models for what good family engagement looks like, said Mapp, director of the Education Policy and Management master’s program at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She defines family engagement as a full and equal partnership between schools, communities and students. Research shows that family engagement benefits not only students but also teachers and families. “When we engage with each other, our deficit-based mindsets about each other disappear,” Mapp said. Most schools think that they are engaging families when they are just involving them, but Mapp said that involvement only requires one-way communication. “Your families are your students’ first teachers. We need to treat them with that respect,” she said.

Mapp developed the Dual Capacity-Building Framework, which outlines how to support family engagement strategies, policies and programs, including building trust, being culturally responsive and fostering collaboration. At the community schools conference, Shadae Harris, Chief Engagement Officer at Richmond Public Schools, shared how she successfully used this framework to improve family engagement around student attendance. After the COVID-19 pandemic, chronic absenteeism rates in Richmond averaged nearly 40% – an all time high. Using the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for guidance, Harris prioritized learning more about the district’s local history, building relationships with families based on mutual trust, and tracking metrics, such as home visits and phone calls. Harris said that when she moved from viewing “engagement as an add-on to something that was deeply rooted in teaching and learning” it led to better attendance at most Richmond Public Schools. The basic elements of this framework can be a roadmap for schools to improve family engagement and achieve goals. 

Honor history

The Dual Capacity-Building Framework identifies obstacles that get in the way of authentic family engagement, including educators’ deficit mindsets and families’ negative past experiences with schools. Harris, originally from Boston, Massachusetts, saw these challenges playing out in her district. To address them, she spent time learning local history so she could better understand the community beyond its negative narratives.

Harris learned about Jackson Ward, a thriving Black neighborhood known as the “Harlem of the South.” This community was home to Maggie Walker, the first Black female president to charter a bank. While Harris started with the “beauty and brilliance” of the people in Richmond, she also recognized the historical harms done to those communities. For example, a highway was built through Jackson Ward that broke up its thriving middle class Black community. She noted that the people affected are grandparents of the students currently in school and that it makes sense that families have lingering distrust in institutions. 

Learning local history isn’t about fixing past wrongs, Harris said. It’s about honoring history and acknowledging harm, which builds “community credibility” and lays the groundwork for families to begin to trust schools. 

 

Prioritize relationships

Practices that are culturally responsive, collaborative and built on mutual trust are key to strengthening family engagement, according to Mapp. Harris put this into practice by assigning family liaison staff members to become “experts” in the district’s neighborhoods. “Communities already have very intricate systems of communication,” Harris said, but schools aren’t always tapped into them. By leveraging existing community assets, Harris and her colleagues adopted a strength-based perspective in their engagement efforts.

When Harris hired family liaisons, she considered what structural barriers might prevent her from hiring people from the communities they would be serving. She found that the qualifications required for the roles, such as having a bachelor’s degree, were restrictive and deterred the candidates she wanted from applying. She revised the application so that it invited applicants to talk about their relationships and connections within the community. Additionally, she extended the position from an eight-month term to a year-round role. “The summer is pivotal, and I’m going to pay you for it,” Harris recalled saying. “You have to value the position.”

With the family liaisons in place and trust built in the community, families felt more comfortable sharing their challenges. Harris discovered that thousands of parents were living in motels. While the Mckinney-Vento Act is in place to support families experiencing homelessness, families living in motels were exempt from these services. Harris secured a grant to provide direct financial assistance to those parents. To date Harris and staff at Richmond Public Schools have helped to secure housing for 130 families. 

Quantify outreach and tell the story

For Harris, measuring the district’s engagement was critical to track progress and make necessary adjustments. She designed an engagement dashboard to monitor key metrics, such as home visits and successful phone calls. The dashboard also allowed staff to record important notes about who they reached and whether the phone call was productive or not. 

“We were able to see these causal connections,” Harris explained. For example, 52% of students at Fairfield Court Elementary School were chronically absent in the years following the pandemic. After home visits, that number went down to 9%. According to Harris, increased learning time from students actually showing up to school is a powerful result of strong family engagement. “Over the past two years, we’ve increased almost 90,000 academic hours,” she said.

Richmond Public Schools’ story illustrates how the Dual Capacity-Building Framework helped one school district, but its application can and should vary according to community needs, according to Mapp. “You have to be intentional,” she said. “Family engagement is a strategy, not a goal.”