Phase two: Focus on parental/guardian engagement.
Moving into the next school year, we want to shift from parent involvement to parent engagement. We will begin by giving parents resources, inviting them to activities, and helping them monitor their child’s progress. Then, we will partner with parents to set goals for their kids and find ways to strengthen our classroom together. We believe when we engage parents in the learning process, our school community will be stronger.
Continuing with the success we had with our open-house family nights, we plan to brainstorm with our staff some themes for a family night (Following Covid guidelines) when we return to school in the Fall. Now that we feel we have many of our parents/guardians involved with our school community, we hope they will continue to walk along side us and increase their engagement.
Our efforts in phase one of our school initiative showed us that we need to be creative and flexible if we want to reach all of our families effectively. We want to introduce time, within the school day, for our teaching staff to have home visits with some parents/guardians that may still be reluctant to come into the school.
The following video titled, Home Visits Make a School Community Stronger, produced by Edutopia, reinforces the importance of meeting the families where they are to fully establish the relationship.