Restructuring Schools To Support
Family Involvement

Developing a successful school-family partnership must be a whole school endeavor, not the work of a single person or program. Traditional school organization and practices, especially in secondary schools, often discourage family members from becoming involved. For example, survey data show that parents of older children are less likely to attend a school event or volunteer at their child’s school than parents of younger children. Sixty-one percent of principals of Title I elementary schools report that most or all of their parents attend regularly scheduled parent-teacher conferences, compared with 22 percent of principals of Title I middle schools (U.S. Department of Education, 1997).

To create a welcoming environment for parents, one that enlists their support in helping children achieve, schools sometimes adopt changes that make them more personal and inviting places. Schools can reorganize, dividing into schools-within-schools, or adopting block scheduling (which includes longer class periods), for example, to promote closer interaction between teachers and students and, by extension, between teachers and families. Schools can solicit parental input to help make decisions on curriculum, course scheduling, assessment, and budget matters. Traditional parent participation events can be redefined to create more meaningful ways to welcome and involve parents in school life.
Whatever steps schools take to develop close partnerships with families on behalf of students’ learning, schools that are most successful are prepared to reconsider all of their established methods of doing business and to restructure in ways that will make them less hierarchical, more personal, and more accessible to parents. Restructuring schools to create a more personalized environment for students and their families is an especially important issue for secondary schools, where parents face special barriers to becoming involved and where parent involvement does in fact drop off significantly.

Designing Parent Involvement Around Family Needs. For many successful schools, the first step in the restructuring process is to assess families’ interests and needs. By asking parents to share their interests, needs, ideas, and goals for family involvement on an ongoing basis, families and staff members can work together to make family involvement a centerpiece of school reform. By contrast, families that hesitate to become involved in schools often complain that administrators and teachers develop parent involvement strategies based on what they think parents want and need, and not on what parents say they want and need.
Several programs address this concern by conducting needs assessments through parent surveys, focus groups, or door-to-door neighborhood walks to gather ideas from parents about how best to promote family involvement.

Parents as Partners in Schoolwide Restructuring. Successful schools include parents as active partners in the restructuring process. Rather than the traditional hierarchical relationship between families and schools, where school staff make
unilateral decisions, successful parent involvement approaches work to develop parents as leaders and equal partners in the schooling process. One way to do this is to create organizational structures for parent participation, such as parent and
volunteer committees. Parents can also serve on other school decision-making committees, such as site-based management councils and school improvement teams. As members of these committees, parents can, for example, share ideas and help make decisions on school policies related to the budget, teacher and principal hiring, schoolwide plans, and parent involvement activities. Together, parents and staff members develop school reform initiatives to facilitate closer student, teacher, and parent relations and to increase student achievement.

New Uses of School Space. Schools can take simple steps to make parents feel welcome. For example, hanging a welcome sign or posting a parent volunteer in the entrance hall to welcome visitors, sign them in, and direct them to classrooms or the office makes a much more comforting first impression than the ubiquitous sign instructing visitors to “report to the office.” Similarly, many parents express uneasiness over the elaborate security measures schools use to combat violence and drugs. Schools could consider creating alternative entrances for parents where security measures are less obtrusive.

Several schools have taken additional steps to make their schools physically welcoming for parents. They have turned unused classrooms into on-site family or parent centers, giving parents a space in which to convene for parent – teacher
meetings, borrow books and other materials, hold workshops, conduct volunteer activities, or simply have coffee and lunch with other parents and school staff.

This information is an excerpt from the Department of Education idea book entitled Family Involvement in Children’s Education - Successful Local Approaches. The entire idea book, as well as examples of what schools are doing to improve parent involvement, can be found at the following web address:
http://www.ed.gov/pubs/FamInvolve/index.html.