Howdy Partner—This is Your School

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If family-involvement activities at your school seem trivial, don't mean much, vacuum up your time and money, and then you can't fathom what connection there might possibly be between the activities and kids achieving academic success, maybe you'd like to grab hold and help turn things around. Debbie Ellis and Kendra Hughes at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory took a look at research and pulled together a way for schools and communities to make it happen. They call it Partnerships by Design.

Going to the dictionary to quote an everyday definition, the authors say partnerships are about building "relationships between individuals or groups that are characterized by mutual cooperation and responsibility, as for the achievement of a specified goal." In terms of school-family-community partnerships, they say, the main goal is to take on responsibility for kids learning academically and growing socially. "Partnerships recognize the importance and potential influence of all members who work with and invest in the education of the children—whose future, in turn, will affect the quality of life in the entire community."

The notion of "partnerships," versus family or parent involvement, opens the door to new ways of working together, and with new groups that might not have been on our radar screen in the past. It takes us way beyond isolated, unrelated, and fragmented activities to embrace school-improvement goals that have meaning for all those who participate. For example, offer Ellis and Hughes, if helping all of the kids to be better readers is the number-one school goal, then most of the activities need to be planned with reading achievement in mind. School-family-community partnership activities need a reading focus—it might include training sessions on how children learn to read, and how to help them learn to read. Volunteer efforts might involve individualized tutoring in reading. The point is to gear activities that contribute to meeting needs that have been identified by the school community.

Today, time matters. Time-deprived parents, overloaded teachers, and kids with daunting schedules drive the demand for meaningful use of time. Irrelevant activities don't make it onto the family calendar. At the same time, parents desire to do everything they can to help their children succeed.

Partnerships by Design is free on the Laboratory's Web site at www.nwrel.org/partnerships/pubs/bydesign.html. Printed copies can be ordered at a small charge ($8.50 plus shipping and handling) by calling 1-800-547-6339, Ext. 519.

This column by Karen Lytle Blaha is provided as a public service by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a nonprofit institution working with schools and communities in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.