“The biggest takeaway from the Family and Community Engagement summer workshops is that there is a difference between engagement and involvement,” Persell Middle School teacher, Lisa Stahlman-Colby, explained to the school’s Family & Community Engagement (FaCE) Team. “In the past we have always involved families in our school but family and community engagement asks us to partner with our families and community to positively engage in the learning of our children so that they can be more successful in school.”

Mrs. Stahlman-Colby was introducing the Persell’s FaCE Team to the shift in how family/community engagement should be perceived by schools. She, and other district staff and community members learned more about effective family and community engagement during a series of workshops this past summer. Each school now has a FaCE team, and is developing a family and community engagement plan unique to its needs and priorities. Persell’s new Family and Community Engagement plan includes a fresh and interactive approach to Open House. Each family will visit their child’s homeroom, and with the guidance of teachers, review their child’s academic data. Together, the students and their families will create a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) goal for the upcoming school year. In addition, the school has invited a wide variety of community organizations, like the Girl and Boy Scouts, Jamestown Community Learning Council and the Boys & Girls Club, to share information with families.

Traditionally, schools have had events or activities like an Open House or a Family Movie Night that invited families to come into the school. But, a shift in how schools think – where families and community members are invited and expected to be partners in children’s education in order to directly impact student’s academic success was reinforced this summer, during three full day foundational workshops.

Teams representing every district school worked with Teneh Weller, a trainer for Scholastic’s Family Engagement Workshop Series, developed by Dr. Karen Mapp, a renowned expert in family and community engagement and senior lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education. The goal of the training is to increase access to research and give schools strategies and tools needed to implement successful home-to-school partnerships. The three sessions focused on:

Underscoring the link between family engagement and student achievement and providing the building blocks for Jamestown schools to elevate family engagement

Helping to deepen participants’ understanding of the U.S. Department of Education’s Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family/School Partnerships: “The Framework builds on existing research suggesting that partnerships between home and school can only develop and thrive if both families and staff have the requisite collective capacity to engage in partnership.”

Connecting family engagement to student learning goals and exploring ways to create exemplary family learning events that are directly linked to each school’s improvement plan.

During the workshop, participants examined four types of Family-School partnerships, and discussed whether families and community members perceive their particular school as a Partnership, Open Door, Come if You are Called, or Fortress school. FaCE teams left the workshop with the tools and knowledge needed to take rich information back to their schools to implement.

Trainer, Teneh Weller, assures that follow-up professional development and team coaching will continue throughout the school year.

“The Jamestown Schools as a whole and all of the school teams are dedicated to ensuring that all families are engaged,” said Ms. Weller. “Student achievement is at the core of all of the work that we did during the summer workshops and will continue throughout the school year. One of the main goals of the summer workshops was for schools to have the tools and knowledge need to effectively plan family engagement activities that are linked to learning and the families at their schools that have not traditionally been engaged.”