Investing in School, Family and Community Partnerships             

By Gord Kerr, M. Ed.

March 8, 2006.  With the release of funds to school boards and authorities and school councils under Ontario’s new Parent Involvement Policy, many people across the province are faced with both the opportunity and the challenge of investing those funds in specific initiatives to foster parent and community involvement.  It is an opportunity to implement some of the ideas that many have had for years “if only we had the money.”  But for some, it may be a challenge to implement those ideas and plans on short notice.

This presents every school board and school council with the seed money and opportunity to consciously invest in strengthening the connections between schools, families and communities for the purpose of improving student learning.  Dr. Joyce Epstein has said many times that small investments often pay large dividends, because it doesn’t take much to reach out to parents or to engage community groups in ways that can help parents and students.

In the Parent Voice in Education Report that led to the creation of this policy, one of the key findings was that “there are many differences among the regions of Ontario and that strategies that work in one area may not be effective in another.   Parent involvement strategies need to be flexible.”  The consultation found that “parents want to see schools and school boards make an active effort to reach out to diverse parents in their jurisdictions.”  “School councils need help and support to be more inclusive.  There are also parents who may not want to be on school councils, but, with support, could be more effectively involved in their children’s education and schools.”  The flexible funding approach appears to have been designed to address this finding and enable local schools and boards to invest in locally developed strategies.

The funding released enables schools and school boards to invest in locally driven initiatives to enhance communication, especially with harder to reach parents within local communities, enhance school events to include diverse groups, help parents help their children with homework and to make good course selections, and encourage parents to take an active role supporting their children in many different ways, including participation in community groups and lessons.

At the School Level

Perhaps there are hard to reach parents or parents from diverse cultural backgrounds within your school community that you can reach out to by mailing material to home or through translated materials, or by supporting parent and student involvement in some of their cultural events.  Perhaps there are community groups already connected with hard to reach or diverse groups in your community and can be brought in to provide further assistance to parents and students within your school.  Perhaps the funds can be used to recognize and reward all the school’s volunteers for their efforts this year or create a welcoming and memorable back to school event in September.  Or perhaps the funds may be used to offset the costs of public transit for school volunteers and parents who want to volunteer their time or attend special events at the school.   

At the Board Level

Perhaps there is an opportunity to assign a staff member to a short term project to collect sample practices from within the board and prepare them for publication to share with principals, teachers and school councils in the fall.  Initiatives to engage parents that are already proven to work locally are some of the easiest for other schools to adopt.  Perhaps there is an opportunity to engage in some professional development for teachers, principals and school council or volunteer leaders focused on how to further engage parents in education, or to build specific outreach and engagement plans for 2006/2007. 

There are research-based strategies and ideas contained within the paper Stimulating Parent Involvement to Stimulate Student Success.  You can also visit www.partnershipschools.org and click on “In The Spotlight.”  This is the website of Dr. Joyce Epstein where you can find over 150 specific initiatives designed to engage parents and the community in education housed within the “Promising Practices” publications.