Including Family Engagement on Your PTA Board
With family engagement work being at the heart of the PTA mission, it only makes sense to consider including a volunteer dedicated to family engagement work. Here are some ideas for what a family engagement chair, family engagement specialist, or family engagement coordinator could do on your board.
LOCAL FAMILY ENGAGEMENT WORK
Create opportunities to listen to families (surveys, focus groups, listservs) to learn specific ways they would like to be more engaged with their child’s learning. Identify common barriers such as time, teacher/ school communication, language/culture, parent’s education, etc. Educate parents/guardians about proven academic and social benefits to students when families are engaged in learning.
Ask the principal and other administrators about their goals for family engagement. What would they like to see happening at the school?
Ask teachers and support staff about their goals for family engagement. What would they like to see? Their feedback could be very different from administration, and should be included.
Ask students how family engagement impacts their learning.
Use feedback from all groups to develop a realistic plan for improving engagement this year. What concrete steps can be taken to better engage families in learning?
Work with PTA leaders to infuse transformative family engagement practices into existing activities. (Example: For PTA family movie night select a film that addresses a young person’s perseverance. After the movie, host dinner with mixed discussion groups of parents, teachers, and students about how lessons from the film apply in the classroom. Provide discussion prompts at each table, and a recording mechanism to collect feedback to share with school and PTA leadership and the larger community.)
Create benchmarks to transform family engagement at your school. Monitor during and at the end of the school year for improvement. Use these results as a basis to set goals for the following year.
COUNCIL FAMILY ENGAGEMENT WORK
Use surveys, focus groups, or other means to determine the current state of family engagement in your school communities. Are families involved (attending events) or engaged (providing input and learning useful information to help their child)?
Partner with school district officials, teachers unions, principals unions, community groups, and/or other educational associations to create and distribute Best Practices for Principals and PTAs. These practices should create the foundation for effective family engagement.
Testify before school boards and county councils to ensure that family engagement remains a priority. Encourage families and students to testify and join in other advocacy initiatives.
Promote the National PTA School of Excellence program as a way for the schools in your council to begin to implement transformative family engagement practices.
REGION FAMILY ENGAGEMENT WORK
Follow the guidelines above for councils, plus:
Create a Family Engagement Advisory Team with your school district to identify goals, provide input and feedback in district-wide initiatives, and to implement the National Standards for Family-School Partnerships equitably in all schools. Offer training on Transformative Family Engagement to families, educators, administrators, and students. Ask your school district to include family engagement training by PTA in onboarding new educators and administrators.
Work within your Family Engagement Advisory Team or region board to ensure equitable focus on family engagement throughout your region, especially in racially, culturally, or economically diverse areas where engagement may be lacking but critical to student success.
Initiate conversations with your state department of education. If there’s not a robust focus on family engagement, push for a work group or task force to elevate the conversation.
Advocate for funding in district and state budgets to support family engagement activities.
Testify before your state legislature to ensure that family engagement remains a priority. Encourage families and students to testify and join in other advocacy initiatives.
There are a number of resources from the National PTA Center for Family Engagement at: pta.org/center-for-family-engagement
You can learn more about transformative family engagement and best practices by listening to the “Notes from the Backpack” podcast, participating in the e-learning courses on transformative family engagement, viewing other videos and resources and you may even learn about future grant opportunities.