Leading Family Engagement in Early Learning: The Role of State Library Administrative Agencies

Family engagement is a shared responsibility among families, educators, and communities to support children's learning and development. For families, it is about the knowledge, attitudes, values, and behaviors that enable children to be motivated, enthusiastic, and successful learners. For libraries, this means having respectful partnerships with families and providing information, guidance, and opportunities for families to be active in their children's learning and development as well as their own lifelong learning. Implementing family engagement is about creating pathways for families to learn together, for example through early literacy activities, STEM and Maker Spaces, summer reading programs, and youth-generated community engagement and digital literacy projects. Rather than designing family engagement as a separate program it can be purposefully integrated into the rich offerings of libraries. To do this effectively means having ambitious but attainable goals and avoiding superficial practice. This policy brief highlights the ways four states--California, Colorado, Georgia, and Maryland--integrated family engagement in early literacy and learning programs. It focuses on the change strategies to innovate, scale, and sustain family engagement.