Building Stronger Family-School Partnerships with United Way Community Schools

MAEC’s Collaborative Action for Family Engagement (CAFE) helps districts and schools to tailor family engagement practices to align with school improvement goals. We customize our comprehensive training to each school or district, ensuring a flexible approach to time and content.

Recently, we partnered with the United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley (UWGLV) to design a specialized three-part Family Engagement Series for United Way Community Schools in Pennsylvania. The three sessions identified strategies to build lasting family-school partnerships, building on each other to equip educators and partners with the tools they need to ensure that every family feels welcome and included in their community:

• Session 1: The importance of family engagement. Participants learned how building real, trusting relationships with families has huge effects on student success, including improving academic outcomes, increasing graduation rates, and supporting students’ social-emotional growth. We introduced the Dual Capacity-Building Framework to support participants to recognize and remove barriers that prevent families from being able to engage fully.
• Session 2: How to integrate family engagement strategies into the Community School work. Participants learned how to leverage Pennsylvania Department of Educations’ Family Engagement Framework to increase family engagement. We examined six key standards for working with families in ways that are respectful, strength-based, and focused on shared goals.
• Session 3: How to develop action plans to sustain family engagement efforts tied to comprehensive planning goals. Using the Plan-Do-Study-Act model, participants reflected on how to identify high impact practices, check the effectiveness of strategies, adjust as needed, and celebrate successes. We shared critical reflection questions to support participants to assess if their efforts are culturally responsive, relationship-driven, and linked to measurable student outcomes.

The series was co-led by our CAFE team members Jessica Webster and Rita Perez. We’re grateful to UWGLV for their partnership and for writing up a summary of our shared work.

Interested in bringing this kind of training to your school or district? Reach out to MAEC at info@maec.org.

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