Strategies to Engage Parents and Guardians at School Districts

District administrators should listen to the needs of and work together with parents to cultivate partnerships to support student success. Effective parental engagement strategies consistently involve parents’ input and share decision-making power across the parent-district partnership. District administrators must demonstrate their commitment to parental engagement by establishing policies to promote positive, early communication about students’ developments in the classroom and by including parents’ perspectives, concerns, and expertise throughout the district’s decision-making processes.

This report discusses strategies to cultivate meaningful parent engagement using a culturally-responsive engagement framework.

Cultivating meaningful parental engagement

District administrators and staff should focus parental engagement initiatives on positive relationship building. Parent engagement strategies should aim to limit deficit-focused communications and increase strengths-based, proactive parental engagement strategies to support student learning.

The Department of Education’s Partners in Education: A Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships offers an approach for promoting positive, strengths-based parental engagement initiatives to create strong partnerships between parents and administrators. Often, parents and district staff lack the skills to facilitate and support parent-district partnerships to promote student success. This framework supports both district staff and parental capacity-building to support meaningful relationship building.

Administrators at Arlington Public Schools convened a Family and Community Engagement (FACE) working group of parents and community members to examine the district’s parental engagement policy as described in this memorandum. FACE, made of 17 parents and community members, met 10 times across 2013-2014 to develop a set of recommendations for the school board to consider regarding family engagement. FACE also committed to creating a three-year implementation plan for the new family engagement policy. You can learn more about FACE and the family engagement policy in this report from Arlington Public Schools.

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Parent engagement and communication preferences surveys

District administrators should disseminate parent surveys to learn about preferred engagement and communication strategies. District administrators typically include questions about communication preferences in annual parent engagement and demographic surveys. Some administrators, however, distribute a separate communication preferences survey to parents. Regardless, administrators either design a survey in-house or hire an outside survey vendor to gather data on communication preferences. Surveys should be confidential, comprehensive, and accessible to all families (e.g., translated into primary languages of families, available through web-based and mobile platforms).

Surveys on communication preferences typically include questions related to communication from a child’s school and district, preferred communication modalities, barriers to communication, quality of communications across the district, and prevalence of two-way communication between parents and educators. Most survey vendors allow administrators to choose types of questions or topics to include in the survey based on the district’s goals.

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District-wide communications plans

Public school districts across the U.S. increasingly need a strategy to better communicate with their stakeholders, including staff, teachers, parents, students, and the wider community. Providing more information to parents about events and activities at their child’s school and better signaling the impacts of district-wide initiatives on the community are both equally important elements of developing a district’s reputation, image, and reliability in the eyes of the public and parents.

The goal of a formal communications plan is to ensure cohesive, effective messaging from all parts of the district to community stakeholders. EAB’s toolkit Creating an Effective District Communications Plan helps districts identify and align communication goals with institutional priorities. The toolkit then maps these goals to various communication channels, serving as the foundation for a formal communications strategic plan.

At Colton School District, administrators included “guiding principles” that serve as a framework for the district’s 2017–2019 communication plan. The three core principles—truthfulness, transparency, and continuous improvement—capture the essence of effective communications plans. The communication plan at Manheim Township School District includes statistics and preferences from a recent parent engagement and communication preferences survey to demonstrate administrators’ commitment to addressing parents’ feedback.

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Download the Report