Making It Matter:

School-Family- Community Partnerships

by Bracken Reed

Ask parents whether they care about their child’s education, and you will nearly always get an emphatic "yes." Ask any community member whether successful public schools are important to the community, and you’ll most likely get the same answer. Ask educators whether family and community involvement is important to student achievement (as NWREL recently did in a 2002 regional needs assessment), and you will find it near the top of everyone’s priority list.

But how does this apparent consensus play out in an actual school or program? All too often effective engagement is not there—everyone cares, but many are unable to translate their concerns into meaningful involvement that affects student achievement.

A new publication from NWREL, Partnerships by Design: Cultivating Effective and Meaningful School-Family-Community Partnerships , addresses this problem in a practical way. Written as a complement to the resource and training manual, Planning for Youth Success, coauthors Debbie Ellis and Kendra Hughes provide an easy-to-use tool for developing partnerships from the ground up.

As the authors note, recent legislation has only intensified the need for meaningful parent involvement. The 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, No Child Left Behind, calls for "new provisions increasing parental notification requirements, parental selection of educational options, and parental involvement in school governance."

The message is hardly new. Research has been pointing to the importance of family involvement for many years, and most schools already have programs in place. The problem is not a failure to understand the importance of the issue, but rather of how to structure programs that are effective, sustainable, and meaningful to all stakeholders in an increasingly high-pressure atmosphere.

Partnerships by Design is grounded both in research and in the everyday reality of families and schools. "Faced with the growing demands to satisfy federal mandates, state requirements, and school policies, while ensuring that students make adequate yearly progress," say Ellis and Hughes, "educators want family and community members to be involved in ways that add to student achievement, but do not detract from their teaching nor add additional duties to their overwhelming workload."

At the same time, "stressed out and overloaded" parents, "juggling jobs, household responsibilities, and their children’s activities," want to be involved in ways that "help their children to succeed in education and life without adding irrelevant activities to their already busy schedules." For many, the stakes are high, time is short, and every activity has to count.

The publication’s easy-to-use forms, worksheets, and activities can be modified to fit the needs of an individual school or program. "It’s designed to be very adaptable," says Ellis. "Depending on local needs and circumstances it could be used in one three-hour session, or taken apart and developed over an entire school year."

It is also appropriate for varying levels of readiness. Whether a school has just formed a partnership development team, has never heard of such a thing, or has had one in place for years, they can save much time and energy by using the publication to create a clear and focused partnership plan.

The process begins by assessing the current state of the school: Who makes up the school community? What are the assets they bring and what are their attitudes and assumptions about each other? What does the physical environment of the school say about its values and priorities? How effective are current involvement activities?

Using the worksheets and completing the suggested activities, the partnership team can focus its involvement on those activities most appropriate and meaningful for student achievement. Other steps in the process include:

Developing shared goals and a clear vision for the future
Conducting student focus groups
Developing an action plan
Doing a needs assessment
Getting feedback on partnerships activities
Evaluating the impact of efforts and sharing successes
Addressing the many potential barriers
Defining the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder

Throughout the process, the focus remains on developing meaningful activities that are directly linked to the curriculum goals of the school. "All partners need to know there will be a bottom-line benefit," say the authors. "To them, meaningful involvement is participating in a broad, academically significant array of activities that allow partners to help children learn, have a direct impact on student achievement, and help solve real school problems."

To purchase copies of Partnerships by Design and Planning for Youth Success: Resource and Training Manual, see the Document Order Form or the NWREL Products Catalog Online at www.nwrel.org/comm/catalog/.

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