Conclusion

To be certain, there is no set recipe for increasing trust in a school or for developing stronger relationships between families, students, principals, and teachers. As Young (1998) writes,

Each individual school, in cooperation with the community in which it serves, must reflect on its current educational program and its relationship with the community in which it is embedded. Based on this self-reflection, the school and the community must jointly determine which strategies are likely to be the most effective in creating a sense of trust…(p. 17).

Making a commitment to building partnerships with diverse families, as the schools profiled in the following Northwest Sampler demonstrate, is a good place to start.