If schools are to effectively involve families in understanding and developing school safety policies, schools must be aware of their students' families' concern, special needs, linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, and work schedules. Schools cannot expect full parent participation in school safety-promoting activities if administrators do not understand who their students' families are. In order to elicit broad family participation in your school's safety efforts, school administrators also need to acknowledge the many family configurations that are likely to make up your school community. In addition to the traditional nuclear family, family configurations may include single heads of households, parents who are divorced or have never married, families in which a parent is incarcerated, families headed by foster parents or grandparents, families of one biological parent and one step-parent, and families in which both parents are the same gender. Students play a pivotal role in involving their parents.
Students are the school's messengers when they take school newsletters and notices home.
They are their parents' messengers when they bring parents' responses back to the school. Parental involvement in school safety does not just happen. Given the great diversity of families that make up many school communities, schools face a real challenge involving every type of family in school safety efforts. Space is often available in churches, fast food restaurants, beauty salons and barbershops, shopping centers, laundromats, and many other neighborhood sites. Offer the talks at times convenient for parents, and bring along lots of information about the school, in several languages if necessary.