Momentous School is an urban elementary school located in Dallas that serves students from three years of age through 5th grade. Ninety-four percent of students are Hispanic, 85 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch, and 50 percent come from families whose predominant language is Spanish. The students achieve strong academic outcomes while at our school. When they graduate at the end of 5th grade, they disperse to a variety of middle schools—public, charter, and private—in the Dallas area. We continue to track our students after they leave us, and we find that 97 percent of them graduate high school on time, 86 percent enroll in higher education, and 88 percent of our college-attending students persist from their first to second year of college. Undoubtedly, one of the drivers of the students' success is our school's emphasis on empowering families from the very start.
Our parent engagement efforts help parents develop advocacy skills to support their child. Once they develop the skills, they can use them to support their child's success in any setting. To accomplish this goal, we focus on two main forms of family engagement: within-family engagement and between-family engagement. We know from research that both of these forms of engagement enhance students' success in school. The first form of engagement, which takes place within a family, is perhaps the most critical (Robinson & Harris, 2014).
Within-Family Engagement: Home Visits and Activities
Our most intensive within-family engagement effort involves monthly home visits with 3-year-old students and their parents. During these visits, we work with families to create vision statements, set up family portfolios, and provide parenting and developmental resources.
- Early in the school year, we ask parents to compose vision statements. In them, parents write down their hopes and dreams for their child's future. By doing so, parents connect today's actions to later outcomes for their child. The process provides a wonderful way for the school to learn about what a family values, which is always a good place to start when having a conversation with a family. We display copies of these vision statements in our parent center and as the first page of the family's portfolio.
- We give each family a family portfolio, a notebook they can use to document their child's learning in the home. Parents share their updated portfolios with the family guidance coordinator at each home visit and with their child's teacher at parent conferences. The purpose of the portfolio is to concretely demonstrate to parents the influence they have on their child's growth and learning.
- We also provide families with practical parenting and developmental information that emphasizes social and emotional health.
Our research confirms that the home visits lead to significant improvements in the quality of the home learning environment. In particular, we find that prior to the home visits, few families' home environments are at or above median levels in such areas as the presence of learning materials, a variety of enrichment experiences for children, and parental modeling of learning behaviors. After monthly home visits over the course of the school year, the vast majority of families' home environments improve to above median levels in these areas.
We also provide parents with learning kits that they return at the end of a two-week cycle. These kits include books, puzzles, children's music, and games based on developmentally appropriate concepts or themes. Each kit also contains a journal for parents to reflect on their experiences with their child and the kit.
Between-Family Engagement: Community Building
To help build a sense of school community, we pair our within-family engagement efforts with between-family engagement efforts. We bring our preK families together near the beginning of the school year at a meeting called "Start Off on the Right Foot." They get acquainted and realize the importance of coming together as a community. From there, we encourage them to plan more fun, family-friendly events with the goal of getting to know each other better. These events run the gamut from potluck dinners to game nights. We also have schoolwide STEM nights where the whole family engages in an engineering challenge with a purpose. In addition, we have two big parent-led schoolwide events, our Día de Niño (Day of the Child) Carnival and our participation in the community Cinco de Mayo parade and festival. Our school also houses a parent center where families are able to plan and lead their own activities, ranging from cooking classes to crocheting.
Using Twitter to Continue Engagement
In addition to these in-person engagement strategies, our school leverages technology to enhance continuous communication with and between parents. Through a parent technology survey, we found that the majority of our families at least had a smart phone. Thus, all teachers created class Twitter accounts, and, at school open house nights, we make sure families are signed up and following their child's teacher. These Twitter accounts not only allow families to get pictures and information about the learning and projects occurring in the classroom but also provide a platform for them to interact with other families. We also use Twitter to communicate about upcoming school events and community opportunities and provide links to helpful websites. The family guidance coordinator uses Twitter to highlight family portfolio entries, and these posts provide inspiration for other families. Here are some examples of families sharing proud portfolio moments over Twitter.
Often, parent engagement is a one-way connection from the school to the home. At Momentous School, we create connections within and between families. We feel that any school could adapt these approaches to develop long-lasting and organic parent engagement that ultimately benefits the child.