How to Strengthen School-Family Partnerships With Proven Strategies

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.”