Roundtable: Collaborating With Families and Communities

Schools succeed only with the support of family and community partnerships. To learn how school leaders strengthen these collaborations and support students from marginalized communities, Principal Leadership contacted Fred Best, the principal of Mariner Middle School in Milton, DE, and the 2024 Delaware Principal of the Year; Eric Hale, the executive principal of The Academies of Bryan Station in Lexington, KY, and the 2024 Kentucky Principal of the Year; and Angelee Morales, the principal of Ouida Baley Middle School in Royse City, TX, and the 2024 Texas Principal of the Year.

Principal Leadership: In your role as a principal, how have you sought to collaborate with families and communities? Are there any best practices you try to follow?

Best: At our school, we do a lot of activities before the school year even starts. For example, we hold a meet-the-teacher night in August where students come in with their parents to meet their teachers and get a lay of the land. For fifth graders who will be sixth graders the following year we hold a meet-the-teacher night in November. That way, they can get a feel for what middle school is like. Besides open houses, we’re incorporating things like Smarter Balanced night, which is our state assessment. Parents attend to learn more about it, and we also offer them food, which helps boost attendance. We re-established our parent-teacher organization about four years ago and now we’re at 25 members strong.

Our school is incredibly diverse (African American, Hispanic, white, and multiracial are our four biggest populations). Because parents don’t always have their own positive experiences with school, they may be apprehensive coming into the building. So really offering that community of caring because they didn’t always have a great experience in school is important. In general, to be as welcoming as possible and better connect with families, we give our teachers time in their professional development week to reach out to every parent in their advisory (basically a homeroom) to just have a positive conversation to start the year. We don’t want the school’s first contact with a family to be negative. We want to try to get three, four, or five positive contacts with that parent before we might have to reach out with a concern. Our district also has a minority action committee made up of students and parents. I’m a standing member of that committee and the secondary school representative. We have conversations about our hiring practices and ensuring we’re putting teachers in front of our students who reflect them and their lived experiences.

Morales: Opportunities for meeting parents have become a big push for us. It’s in a lot of our goal setting because we used to be a pretty rural district where community members knew everybody. I’ve been in this district for 20 years. I’ve seen a lot of growth, and new families are moving here. One of the ways we reach out to our parents when they first arrive is before the school year starts, we invite them and their students to face-to-face, sit-down meetings with our two counselors to plan their students’ schedules. It’s not something where we send them a link to do it online. Once they’re here they usually meet an administrator (an assistant principal or me) and teachers who are passing through the office. They get a sense of what our campus is about.

Hale: My school is an urban, Title I high school in the shadow of the University of Kentucky. About 2,100 kids are enrolled and 44 different countries are represented, and more than 30 different languages are spoken at home. We have an extremely diverse student body and a very diverse community that we serve. To enable two-way communication between our school and families, we purchased with our Title funds the TalkingPoints app, which translates the texts we send into a student’s home language. Like many schools, we use SMORE, to create a common newsletter we send to all families. We also offer many opportunities for students to get involved in extracurricular and cocurricular activities. We have the state’s only mariachi ensemble because we do serve such a high population of Spanish-speaking families. And through those activities we try to create opportunities to connect with our families because families enjoy watching their children perform. We know that to be true regardless of race, ethnicity, language, and income.

Because we have career academies at our school, we collaborate with local businesses through a business advisory board. These partnerships help us match our kids’ interests and expose them to jobs and career opportunities. Often, our students know only the careers that are right in front of them or that family members have. We have more than a hundred business partnerships here in Lexington. We’re always looking for new ways to make sure people have a sense of belonging and let our partners know we have extremely talented kids who also happen to be bilingual and multilingual.

Principal Leadership: How do you engage with the families of students with IEPs?

Best: I’m fortunate. My dad was an administrator, and he always told me the best thing you can do is to hire people around you that make you look good. I have a special education engagement coordinator who’s the best in the business. She’s really good with families. My assistant principal and I make a practice of one of us attending each IEP meeting, so the parents know how important IEPs are to us as well. It doesn’t matter what kind of IEP meeting, whether it’s a re-evaluation or if a parent called a meeting. Our MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Support) process has helped with that as well because there’s a lot more conversation with parents before we get to adding an accommodation or recommending that a student be tested for special education. A lot more communication is involved throughout that process now, which is super important.

Hale: It depends on what the situation is. We have a rather large administrative team. Assistant principals serve as career academy principals, and they typically will attend IEP meetings for students within their academies. As the executive principal, I serve more of a CEO role. I’m a father of a five-year-old with autism, so it’s important fundamentally and from a values standpoint that we make everybody feel valued. We make sure that includes parents, students, and anyone who would attend IEP meetings. We want to make sure parents and families are heard and that parents and families are partners at the table. Most of the time at the high school level, it’s not the parent’s first IEP meeting so a lot of what they may bring to the meeting is from their previous experiences with these meetings, whether that be positive and/or negative. We try to navigate those meetings as efficiently and effectively as possible and make sure the experience for the parents is positive. We want everybody to feel like they’re an active member of their child’s education and it’s not just the school, it’s not just the parents. It’s together we try to do what’s best for their child while they’re under our supervision and care.

Morales: We have a great special education and 504 department, and they send home the notices of the meetings. Either one of my three APs or I attend IEP meetings. We have an IEP scheduler for our campus—that’s her main job, to be flexible with those parents. It’s important for us to attend because we know the bigger picture of where that student is and what resources we have available. For example, if a parent says their child is struggling with handwriting, we can tap into OT or PT as a service if they qualify for that. In our district, principals or assistant principals facilitate IEP meetings; our diagnosticians do not. As administrators, we just have more updated information. There’s special education law that may have changed, and that’s addressed in our principal meetings, so we know about it.

Principal Leadership: What community organizations does your school partner with, how did those come about, and how have they impacted your school community?

Morales: We have a very strong connection with a lot of our community churches. Our district meets with them regularly, and they’ve adopted our schools. If we have a family that’s in need, we can tap into that church support. And it’s vice versa. The main church in our community is a Methodist church, and it was struck by lightning in May. It has a historic building that completely burned to the ground. Our schools opened for their congregants to be able to come in and continue their worship here.

We also partner with an organization of community members who have taken it upon themselves to collect food pantry items for kids. Our mascot is the bulldogs so that organization puts the items in backpacks that they call “paw packs.” They work with our counselors to identify students who need food items or any necessities in the home. They collect donations from the community and bag them in backpacks. They drop them off on Friday and our kids come in and they get a backpack. Other kids can’t see they’re going home with these items, which helps our students not feel embarrassed. If this organization has any extra donations, they give it to our nurse to put in our care closet for students in need to take home.

Best: For nearly two years, we’ve partnered with Children’s Beach House, a local nonprofit organization, to offer our students extra support outside of school. They offer academic support and tutoring. They’ll also take students on field trips and engage in outside activities with them and physical movement activities. We also partner with our local YMCA. They’ll come to our school two days a week to pick students up after school and transport them to the Y for physical activities and enrichment classes, like art and pottery.

Hale: Like I said earlier, we have five academies at our school. Every freshman is in freshman academy, and they get exposed to the four career academies through a course we call freshman seminar. They then choose which academy to enroll in for the next three years of high school: the Medical Academy, the Leadership Academy, the Information Technology Academy, and the Engineering & Manufacturing Academy. Each of these academies has their own business advisory board. For example, our medical academy partners with the University of Kentucky, and their students who are pursuing degrees in the medical field mentor our students who are interested in the medical field. Another partnership is with Lexington Children’s Museum. That’s with our engineering academy. Our students are helping the museum build and design a play area. We have many more partnerships that show how we create a sense of relevancy in what kids are learning in our building and then create opportunities for them to see career and employment options. It’s creating that connection between now and the future because high school is only so long.

Principal Leadership: Did anything in your principal preparation program prepare you for engaging in these kinds of partnerships?

Morales: Mine did. I went to the university to do my master’s in educational administration. We had several projects to help us engage with parents. For instance, we had to explain to parents how they could attend a school board meeting and speak there at an open forum if they had suggestions or concerns for the school district. So, I feel like I was prepared, but a lot of my assistant principals are doing online learning to get their principal certifications. To ensure they get a more personalized experience, I mentor them in working with parents. Our veteran teachers also mentor our newer teachers. If they get a parent email, they may not understand the tone, or they might misconstrue it. So, it’s good they have a person on campus to go to and say, “How do I answer this parent?” Sometimes they see it as an attack on them professionally and there’s a respectful way to answer the email and get the desired result.

Best: I don’t know that I signed up for a class that was on making connections with parents when I was going through my master’s degree and in my teaching career. But I think you quickly learn how important those partnerships are. It’s about partnering with the parent to get the best possible outcome for that child. They can’t do it without us, and we can’t do it without them. This is my 20th year as an administrator. I do things a lot differently today with a parent than I did my first year. My first year I was the know-it-all assistant principal who was young and ready to roll. Now, I have four of my own kids who I’ve raised, and that really changes your perspective. You begin to understand that every parent is doing their best. I have students who wake up in million-dollar homes and I have a student who woke up in a car this morning. But understanding that’s the best the parent has to offer and coming alongside them and offering support is part of our role. I honestly don’t know there’s a class that could prepare you for that.

Hale: Like Fred, I didn’t have courses on this either. One thing I see as an advantage for me in this role is that I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school. My mom was a single mom. I grew up in the projects. I really agree with Fred that all parents are doing the best they can, and they love their kids. They want what’s best for them. Sometimes they may not know what’s best because of limited experiences and/or limited capacity. But every parent is doing the best they can with the skills they have. It’s important as a school to keep that in mind. We should be a judgment-free zone. We don’t judge parents for their skill set. We’re here to try to help. We make sure that we create a school culture where whether you grew up here or you were born in Central America or you were born in Africa, that you’re welcome here in our school and we’re going to do the best for your child that we can.