One of my favorite school celebrations is National Family Engagement Month which is in November.
November is a great time to spotlight the needs, growth and impactful work of family engagement. I believe in creating experiences that help bring schools, families and communities together. These experiences are collaborative, engaging and resourceful for the whole family.
Family engagement best practices identify ways in which schools can improve the ways in which it builds, retains and develops relationships with parents, families and communities.
Now the other part of that is having school and district leaders who understand and value family engagement best practices to help ensure they’re being implemented successfully in our schools.
One way school districts can celebrate family engagement month is by sponsoring quarterly family-wide activities to celebrate families and to help build, sustain and grow relationships between families, communities and schools.
For this year’s celebration of National Family Engagement Month, please consider these three things for your calls to action:
Advocate collectively on a state level to have the funding formula for public and charter schools improved.
Build partnerships with city leaders to build safer routes to schools.
Educate parents, families and educators on the importance of IHP’s.
Advocating for improved funding formulas on a state level helps us to see the increases in teacher salaries, resources spent for updated building infrastructure and most importantly academics for learning in and out of the classroom.
Building partnerships is a very important family and community engagement standard. I want to take this a step further to connect families, communities and schools by encouraging us during this month to advocate for city leaders and school board members to collaborate on building safer routes to school.
Educate parents, families and educators on the importance of IHPs. Individualized Health Plans are for students who have severe and underlying health conditions that can be impacted by school building infrastructure, access to clean water and air and most prevalent, in cases of emergencies like the pandemic. Having parents and educators work together to ensure IHPs are updated ultimately helps our students and saves lives.
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