Parents and families are children’s first teachers, and participation in their education shouldn’t stop as young people enter the TK-12 system.
November is Family Engagement Month and the California Family and Community Engagement Initiative (CA FACE Initiative) has resources to assist local educational agencies in building connections with students and their loved ones year-round.
Led by the Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation (CDE Foundation) with support from the California Department of Education, leaders of the initiative see Family Engagement Month as a perfect time to share local stories and successes related to strong school-home partnerships and illustrate the positive impact that these relationships can have on student outcomes — a correlation backed by decades of research — and the community as a whole.
“It’s incredibly important to take the time to get to know families and students and to build that trusting relationship with them,” said Lisa Borrego, senior director of the CA FACE Initiative. Establishing two-way communications, where LEAs can share and receive information with the community, is an important aspect of this.
“Engagement looks different in 2025,” Borrego added, noting that LEAs shouldn’t be afraid to embrace options like texting and providing engagement opportunities that incorporate hybrid attendance or video conferencing in addition to more traditional strategies like in-person events, flyers, calls and emails.
Borrego said that training educators on the subject to empower them in their interactions with families is an another way to set schools up for success. Diana Meza, associate director of the CDE Foundation, explained that, ideally, elements of family engagement are “braided through everything that we do within our educational setting.”
The CA FACE Initiative, launched in 2023, aims to empower LEAs, educators and families to build strong two-way home-school partnerships to help unlock the potential of every learner. Its goals include boosting awareness of available family engagement resources and related best practices, increasing access to evidence-based family engagement resources, supports and promising practices and advocating for culturally responsive family engagement practices.
Implementing culturally responsive practices helps build trust and an inclusive culture and can aid in healing negative experiences parents or family members had or witnessed in their own past, Borrego noted.
Resources
To address some of the most common obstacles LEAs face in engaging families, like challenges related to transportation or navigating parents’ busy schedules, education leaders should try “to find those ways to see engagement differently and value families for where they’re at and what they can contribute to improve their student’s success,” Borrego said. If parents don’t have free time to volunteer on campus, simply following up on their students’ homework assignments, keeping up with grades and making sure they get good rest to be ready for the school day are all valuable contributions.
Local context plays a critical role when identifying strategies to use in an LEA. “There are different ways for you to communicate and engage your families, but you have to know who you’re working with,” Meza said. Gestures like producing resources in multiple languages and having translators available to facilitate conversations can have a positive effect, as can putting all family engagement information like volunteer opportunities in one convenient location like a webpage. The page can also serve as a space to highlight any family engagement-related content involving staff or families.
The CA FACE Initiative’s guide, Ignite Engagement! Communications Best Practices for Building Family Engagement Awareness, is a tool LEAs can use in their efforts this November and all year.
“This guide is designed to help you build trust with families through powerful storytelling and consistent messaging. It’s perfect for communications teams, school leaders and anyone championing school-family partnerships,” its description states. “Whether you’re starting a new initiative or strengthening existing ones, this guide provides strategies you can use all year long.”
The guide includes planning tips, communications templates and advice on crafting engaging content, information on tracking metrics and a sample calendar, including plenty of ideas for Family Engagement Month.
Another resource promoted by the CA FACE Initiative is the Dual Capacity Framework for Family-School Partnerships 2.0, which was developed by family and community engagement expert Karen Mapp, who currently serves as a professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The framework offers a comprehensive approach to family engagement that focuses on building both families’ and educators’ capacity to uplift students. It has four components, which frame the reasons educators and families have struggled to create connections, give research-based guidance on how to make and sustain partnerships, outline the goals for strong home-school relationships and describe how improvements in capacity result in educators and families working in a mutually supportive manner that betters the lives of students and schools.
Find these resources and more here.
