Engaging families seemed to emerge as the most important focus for the district in its effort to make productive connections outside the school for the benefit of students. Engaging business and industry folks, community organizations and others are important, but not as important as engaging families. Engagement is a process. There need to be commitments made at the beginning of the process and opportunities created to assess whether engagement is producing the hoped-for outcomes. Engagement requires follow through with agreements made or understandings established.
Engagement rests on relationships.
Relationships offer an opportunity to develop trust and a sense of integrity. Engaging parents is essential for school staff people. Perhaps in future years each building staff could be required to include a section in their School Improvement Plan which would focus their attention on engaging parents. Perhaps we could develop a model which could be used to forge ongoing connections with communities in the future. Next meeting of our committee.