Parents as Partners: Engaging Families in Schools

In Oregon, we're just not meeting the benchmarks of having kids graduate and having kids being healthy. There's something that's missing, and to me, the critical component is the family. The parents are there. They want to support their kids to be successful. I mean, the missing link is how do they successfully connect to the school. Through its Early Works Initiative in Southern Oregon, the Children's Institute, along with Ford Family Foundation, Yoncalla Elementary School, and other community partners, is leveraging public resources in this town of just 1,000 people to provide early learning opportunities for at-risk young children and families who live here. A critical part of this initiative is the use of research-backed strategies to engage these families before their children reach kindergarten. Here, everything is so far away. I think that's the hardest part, really, is doctors and mental health and dentists and the important things, grocery stores. Sometimes you don't want to go, like, up to somebody's house. You see they have kids. You don't just want to walk up to their house and say, hey, I see you have kids the age of my kids. You want to play? You want to hang out? You want to talk? You want to visit, have coffee? That's a hard bubble to break sometimes. Amanda Brown has a lot to juggle by herself. Her husband is a long-haul truck driver who works the graveyard shift. The family makes just enough that they don't qualify for much assistance and food stamps, but not enough to pay all the bills. Her children have medical issues as well as behavioral and mental health complications. As part of the Early Works initiative, Yoncalla Elementary has established the Family Room at the school, a place where parents of young children can connect to resources and meet other parents. Brown takes her youngest daughter, Kaylin, there every week. She says spending time there helps her feel like her struggles are normal. It's the kids' school. It's not somewhere that somebody else's space. It makes it easier for you to talk to the other parents and get acquainted and then get comfortable where you can spend time together. The Family Room, says Amanda, gives her both more resources and more confidence as a parent. Research has shown that when parents are supported through this kind of community engagement, their kids are more prepared for school and more likely to graduate. It's families like the Browns that demonstrate a fundamental tenet of the initiative. When schools and communities invest in parent engagement, kids benefit. The facts are telling you this is not going to work. Families are too overwhelmed. All of the conditions for potential failure are there. The great thing is that you see every day how it is possible. This school is my life. I'm all the time here. Lucia Sanchez is also involved with the Early Works initiative at a second Early Works location, Earl Boyles Elementary in southeast Portland. Through this initiative, she's enrolled her son in the preschool program and volunteers in his classroom. She's working on a job skills internship through the school's lending library. At 25, Sanchez is a single mom with five children. I get a really, really tight budget. Really, really tight budget. There's these months that we just struggle a lot. Well, I intend not to show it, but they can't tell. Kids can tell. I try to but they can't. Without stable housing, Sanchez and her kids bounce from her mom's house to her sister's house. Earl Boyles Elementary, she says, has become the most stable part of her family's life and it's helped improve her parenting. My kids are a little bit behind on math, so what I'm pushing them in the school is to count and to multiply. When we're cooking, see they're getting me two eggs and multiply it by five. That's the great thing of being in a school, especially like Earl Boyles, that every day you see families, you know, bringing their kids to school, volunteering in the classroom, talking with their kids about being successful, about their goals. Together with our partners, the Children's Institute is sharing what we've learned through the Early Works initiative in these two schools to create a mind shift about family engagement in education across the state. We've had so many districts, legislators, foundations, leaders locally, statewide, nationally visit Earl Boyles and one of the most memorable pieces of those visits have been when they've heard from parents about their transformation from seeing themselves as, oh, I'm just a parent, to seeing themselves as, I'm a parent and a leader and an educator. With the Early Works initiative, the Children's Institute is helping to educate leaders and to create policy that will make it possible for families all over Oregon to feel as engaged and empowered as Lucia Sanchez and Amanda Brown. I don't know another school that would welcome the two and three-year-olds into the school the way they do here. They want the younger kids as comfortable with that school as they can be on the first day of kindergarten. When parents put forth the effort and the school puts forth the effort to include everybody, that the kids know that the teachers and their parents just want their success. What the Children's Institute wants to do is take what we've learned at our Early Works sites and show people how it can change lives for kids and families. What we are trying to do at a statewide level is create a mind shift to engage families earlier and partner with them in their children's education. We believe it'll fundamentally change the equation for kids in the state of Oregon.