It’s indisputable that most students perform better academically when they have parents or adults to help with homework and to be advocates with teachers and principals.
But in many communities, parents who juggle multiple jobs, don’t speak much English, or have low levels of education often don’t have the time or resources to make meaningful connections to their child’s schooling experience.
That’s why some leading-edge districts have made it their job to reach out to families and create more welcoming and accessible ways for parents to be part of their children’s schooling.
In Washoe County, Nev., for example, the school district’s family-engagement work includes organizing home visits by teachers—and training those teachers to make the most of those face-to-face encounters in students’ homes.
In Federal Way, Wash., the leader of family-engagement efforts taps a diverse array of parents to serve on committees or task forces that inform major decision making in the district, including high-level hires.
Still, the specialized field of parent and family engagement has mostly been driven by ambitious leaders at the district level. And even in districts with robust programming, resources to support the work are often tight.
But new and potentially bigger forces are building around the need for schools and educators to forge deeper connections with parents and community members.
Philanthropists—in particular the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation of New York—are championing the flow of more money into family-engagement initiatives, including research to identify what efforts are effective.
And the federal budget has set aside $10 million to help fund efforts by several state education agencies and outside partners to develop strong parent and community programming.
The Every Student Succeeds Act also directs states and districts to develop plans to work with families and surrounding communities—a requirement that has spawned a multistate endeavor to create guidelines and exemplars for schools and districts to follow.
Advocates for building strong ties between schools and families say it’s a major opportunity for a proven, yet underutilized strategy to make schools better.
“There is a lot of excitement, and more of an evolution in where both policymakers and funders feel like they want to increasingly put their money,” said Vito Borrello, the executive director for the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement…
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Contact:
Sarah Ostman
Communications Manager
ALA Public Programs Office
312-280-5061 sostman@ala.org
CHICAGO — Twenty-five libraries have been selected to participate in the pilot phase of the Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) Great Stories Club, a thematic reading and discussion program series that will engage underserved teens through literature-based library outreach programs and racial healing work, the American Library Association (ALA) announced.
The TRHT GSC is supported by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
An expansion of ALA’s long-standing Great Stories Club program model, the TRHT Great Stories Club will feature books that explore the coming-of-age experience for young people in historically marginalized groups. The TRHT Great Stories Club is a part of the Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation efforts, a comprehensive, national and community-based process to plan for and bring about transformational and sustainable change, and to address the historic and contemporary effects of racism.
The grantees represent twenty public libraries, two K-12 school libraries, one academic/college library and two prison libraries. Some grantees will work in partnership with alternative schools, youth detention centers and other organizations that serve youth. View a full list of grantee libraries and their partner organizations.
The libraries will work with small groups of teens to read and discuss three titles — selected by librarians and humanities scholars to resonate with reluctant readers facing difficult challenges — on the theme “Growing Up Brave on the Margins.”
Featured titles will include “Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal” by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona; “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas; and “MARCH: Book One” by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, illustrated by Nate Powell.
Participating libraries will host at least three book discussion programs and at least one interactive racial healing session, led by a racial healing practitioner familiar with the Kellogg Foundation’s TRHT framework and racial healing approach. Programming will take place between May and October 2018.
Towson University, a public university near Baltimore, Maryland, will implement the TRHT Great Stories Club program by drawing on partnerships between Towson’s Center for Student Diversity and students from Baltimore City Schools.
“Our primary goals are that participants in the program get these three empowering books in their hands and get to meet each other in a space where their voices are central,” wrote Miriam DesHarnais, research and instruction librarian at Towson University’s Albert S. Cook Library. “By connecting the high school students with university students who are involved with Towson University’s Black Student Union, Towson Freedom School and our library’s A-LIST Student Leadership Program, we hope to provide a window into what activism and engagement on a college campus can look like.”
Grantees will receive 11 copies of each of the three book selections (ten to gift to participants; one for discussion leader/library collection); programming materials such as discussion guides, reading lists and program activities; and training opportunities, including travel and accommodations for a two-day orientation workshop in Chicago for project directors.
The TRHT Great Stories Club will be administered by ALA’s Public Programs Office in partnership with ALA’s Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services.
About the American Library Association
The American Library Association is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with approximately 57,000 members in academic, public, school, government and special libraries. The mission of the American Library Association is to provide leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.
About the ALA Great Stories Club
A project of the American Library Association (ALA), the Great Stories Club (GSC) is a reading and discussion program model that targets underserved, troubled teen populations. Launched in 2006, the GSC has received funding from Oprah’s Angel Network, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ford Foundation, bringing literary reading and discussion programming to more than 800 libraries and 30,000 young adults. The project seeks to inspire teens to consider “big questions” about the world around them and their place in it, affecting how they view themselves as thinkers and creators; establish important connections between underserved youth, their public library and community support agencies; and contribute to improved literacy and changed, positive attitudes toward reading.
Did you know that before entering kindergarten, low-income students are an average of about one year behind other students in math and reading? Did you know that African-American and Hispanic children begin kindergarten up to 13 months behind? These are gaps in both opportunity and achievement.
With support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, NCSL convened 23 legislators and two legislative staff at a two-day seminar in Seattle in November to focus on early learning policy strategies to address these gaps.
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the federal education law passed in 2015, there are new opportunities for states to renew their efforts to give each student a similar start to their education and to ensure that they do not fall behind once they enter kindergarten.
These policymakers dialogued with 12 national policy experts on the economics, data, research and policies related to opportunity gaps, comparing their own state data to national trends and workshopping ideas. Participants left the meeting with ideas, questions and next steps for when they return home, including the following policy options:
Improved data collection to support more robust accountability and reporting.
Adequate funding and tracking resources.
Importance of high-quality teaching.
Extra supports or wraparound services.
Strategies to support English Language Learners.
Copies of all PowerPoint presentations discussing these policy options can be found here.
Perhaps hearing some of the meeting takeaways has sparked some ideas for you as well. To learn more about NCSL’s work on closing opportunity gaps through early learning opportunities in ESSA, please visit NCSL’s webpages on closing opportunity gaps and supporting early learning, or contact Madeleine Webster and Matt Weyer.
Madeleine Webster is a policy specialist in NCSL’s Education program.
