In order to put on a full-scale production, family involvement in the design and execution elements of the show were critical. At the onset of the show after the cast list was established, my colleague Bresean and I held an in-person parent meeting with the families of every single member of our 83 member cast. At the meeting, described our vision for the show and our desire for families to take the lead in key aspects of the production while we focused on preparing the scholars for their stage debut. Parents immedately developed committees and teams to meet the needs of the production team and led the charge on various aspects of the play that they felt best suited to provide assistance with.

Because we asked for families to volunteer according to their strengths, we were able to find families with extensive sewing skills who designed the costumes for every single cast member. One parent, from Ghana, traveled back to her home country to secure bulk fabrics for the creation of the costumes. This ensured that the show reflected the rich cultural tradition of a region of the world where many of our students were from. Her extensive skills as a master seamstress allowed us to have every costume custom-tailored to fit each child. As a result, the cast was able to learn more about the symbols present on their clothing and our storytelling extended into the elaborate costumes the parent stitched together with love.

Throughout the process, families took the lead in key aspects of the production and the ultimate outcome was proof that their involvement and engagement mattered. Families spent countless volunteer hours designing the school Playbill, applying costume makeup to every single child actor between shows, supported scholars in memorizing their lines during rehearsals, met the audiovisual needs of the show, and much more. By keeping open lines of communication with parents about our concerns through weekly emails, in-person meetings, and phonecalls, we were able to involve the families in the school in a way they never had before. As a result, enrollment numbers in our Pre-K program began to surge with new families from the neighborhood, opting to enroll their children in the neighborhood public school rather than the private or charter school options which are usually sought after in Ward 4. Without the involvement of the families in this production, the production and consequent attitudes towards family involvement, engagement, and collaboration would not exist.

As we began production for our next play, Aladdin Jr., we realized that we would need considerably more floor space to accommodate all of our child actors in the production. Immediately, parents came together and began construction of an extension of the stage, which granted the actors another 165 feet of stage. These families came together and met over the weekends to measure the stage, purchase the lumber, lent their tools and labor, and ultimately, designed the perfect stage extension for the production.

When the initial COVID school shut down cancelled our 2020 run of Aladdin, families and students were devastated. It felt as though a major blow had been issued to our school community and the families rallied to ensure that the PSCO allotted funding with a dedicated budget upon the return to in-person learning. In December of 2021, our school community eagerly annouced the return of the theatre arts program in our newly renovated school building.

Collaborating and working alongside parents in the execution of a schoolwide event demonstrated to me that there is a reciprocal relationship between family engagement and access to improved student outcomes. The access opportunities presented by the school production also support with my family engagement each school year. Because of the longevity of this initiative, I know most of the families in the building and they look forward to the day when their scholar will be a member of my 5th grade classroom. I feel honored to serve my school community and feel incredibly blessed to regularly live out my own passions and interests both inside and outside the classroom. When teachers see the intrinsic value of the cultural capital held by families and students and leverage it, the possibilities for student achievement and access to equity-building opportunities are boundless.

As I shared earlier, sometimes access cannot be achieved through just in-house programming alone. As a monolingual person that has never travelled beyond North America, I am limited in how I can provide my scholars meaningful access to expand their global perspectives. To address this deficit, I applied to the Embassy Adoption Program, which is a selective-enrollment, application-only program. The program is designed for 5th and 6th grade students and boasts a robust partnership with the Washington Performing Arts, over 40 embassies and consulates, and the DCPS Global Education department. The program provides transformational learning experiences, “international perspectives and cross-cultural lessons” by connecting local DCPS classrooms with an embassy or consular office partner (District of Columbia Public Schools, n.d.). Prior to my admission into the program, students had limited opportunities to develop global competency and awareness in school outside of a once-weekly, 45-minute Spanish language class, which offered the same rudimentary curriculum for all students in grades Pre-K through 5, regardless of their language proficiency. The lack of differentiation and lack of real-world experiences resulted in low levels of student engagement and high levels of behavioral difficulties, as evidenced by student referral data.

The program is a natural fit for my diverse, collectivist classroom community of racially and ethnically divere students with languages, heritages, and cultures spanning across 5 continents and more than 20 nations. Programming which affirms and validates the lived experiences of those who have recently immigrated to the United States also bridges relationships between children with limited travel experience and global awareness. Both subsets of students are more likely to attend public schools with limited funding and limited access to programs and organizations with considerable social and economic capital. By enrolling my classroom into the program, I was able to secure access to experiences, excursions, and opportunities which are not typically unavailable to Title I school students because of the cost barrier. As a result, my students regularly participate and benefit from the exposure to immersive experiences such as cooking classes, out-of-state field trips, and even the development of their leadership and diplomacy skills which are generally limted only to those with the highest levels of social capital.

The second access opportunity I will showcase is a two-year long partnership with An Open Book Foundation, a 503c non-profit in Washington, D.C. whose mission is to provide access to books, authors, and illustrators in high-needs schools. The partnership was developed through a relationship I developed with an author, Mary Amato, through a DC Arts grant. After Mary's first visit to my classroom, she and I kept in touch and we entered a formal partnership together which was fully-sponsored by An Open Book Foundation in SY 2020-2021. Together, author Mary Amato, An Open Book Foundation Programming Coordinator Joseline Molina, and I developed a year-long comprehensive narrative reading and writing curriculum together, designed to address my students' lacking skills in the Reading Literature and Written Expression domains of the Common Core State Standards. Scholastic (n.d.) posits that long-term partnerships which promote literacy in the classroom are positively correlated with student achievement when the structure of the opportunities are "well integrated, based on standards, and tied to the curriculum" (Scholastic, n.d.). Because parents had greater visibility into the academic struggles of their students when they were learning from home, when I shared the announcement of the partnership to the class, several parents expressed their gratitude and excitement towards the collaboration.

Prior to the partnership, my students performed below grade level expectations for reading and writing during district-wide assessments and benchmarks in the areas of narrative writing and literary storytelling elements, such as characterization, plot development, and theme. During our planning meetings, we discussed ways by which we could address these skills through monthly author visits with Mary Amato, designed to build student interest and engagement in reading and to improve their writing stamina and technique when responding to narrative writing tasks. It was my desire to ensure that students had access to physical books during the pandemic, when libraries were closed and many students did not have access to challenging texts at their reading levels. Through the partnership, students were gifted 6 copies of various texts by author Mary Amato, writing materials, notebooks, and a differentiated workshop which was designed to address their specific literacy needs.

Similar to the access opportunity for the Embassy Adoption Program, to ensure the partnership would provide students meaningful and truly transformative access, I considered the partnership's short-term and long-term potential impact, availability within the school's current programming offering, regional obviousness, potential threats and challenges, as well as the potential for high student interest and engagement. To facilitate the resource selection, I utilized the Resource Selection Guide and supplimental materials provided in Teaching for Transformation I to rank six prospective partnerships by their ability to provide meaningful access to my students. In all areas of consideration, this partnership ranked highest out of all of the other partnerships I considered, providing students with the greatest access to opportunity given their demographics and the demographics of the school, at large. To demonstrate my role in creating this opportunity for students, I have shared copies of email planning correspondence, a featured blog post about my students and their writing on the Teach For America website, and marketing tweets from An Open Book Foundation, which highlight the materials which were shipped to each student's home.

In the planning documentation emails, the process of procuring the partnership with Ms. Amato through An Open Book Foundation is detailed, as is the ongoing planning of the program's scope and sequence and alignment to Common Core State Standards-based instruction to measure the impact of the program on the students' literacy acquisition over the duration of the partnership together. The emails also detail the process of distributing books and materials to each of the students during the virtual-learning school year of 2020-2021 and how we planned to distrubuted the books and materials to students.