Organizing Family and Community Connections With Schools: How Do School Staff Build Meaningful Relationships with All Stakeholders?

Twenty years of research on school performance has created a body of knowledge that grounds today's school improvement efforts and has resulted in a concise list of characteristics that are common to high-performing schools. As accountability becomes more and more important, educational leaders across the nation are actively attempting to foster these qualities in their schools: (1) A shared understanding of goals and expectations for all involved in the school system; (2) High academic standards clearly defining what students are to know and be able to do; (3) A strong cadre of leaders providing support for the goals and expectations of the school and the school community; (4) Procedures for purposeful collection and analysis of data on students, programs, and staff (5) Strong relationships with family and community partners. Unfortunately, schools and districts commonly expend most of their time and effort developing the first four qualities and neglect to build strong relationships with family and community. These relationships can result in additional support for improvement efforts, and with the ever-increasing demands on schools to continually improve, schools need to maximize every possible resource. If school leaders desire to actively engage families in purposeful actions to support student learning, they need to design an effort that will provide parents with the tools and strategies to do this as well as work with them to insure that they understand how to use these tools. In this document, the author suggests that one of the first steps in this process is to develop purposeful relationships between family members and school staff. Ways to put this idea into practice are explored.