While participating in the Family Leaders for Ohio Schools Academy at the Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center, Ohio parent Amanda Aubrey developed a plan to host what she has coined a Family Connection Circle event at her local elementary school. Read more about her plan below.
Introduction
Family engagement plays an important role in fostering student success and building strong school communities. Many families feel they lack opportunities to share their perspectives or feel unheard in school decision-making processes. To help foster this need, I will implement a family listening session designed to create open communication between parents and school leadership. This initiative will provide a welcoming space for families to ask questions, share concerns, and contribute to meaningful dialogue. With parents voices and feedback, we can strength trust with the school, increase engagement, and ensure families feel valued as active partners in their child’s education.
Goal
The goal of this project is to increase family engagement with at least 10 parents in attendance and use pre-and post-event surveys to ensure parents feel heard and were able to voice concerns. This will be accomplished by:
- Awareness & Outreach: Promote the listening session through 2 communication channels to ensure all families are informed.
- Parent Recruitment: Secure 10 parents to attend the listening session.
- Pre-Event Survey: Send a pre-event survey out to our parents to identify topics of interest.
- Structured Listening Session: Host a listening session that includes discussion and parent sharing time.
- Post-Event Feedback: Collect post-event feedback within a week from at least 75% of participants.
- Follow-up & Communication: Within two weeks provide families with a summary of key themes and next steps.
Expected Outcomes
The expected outcome is that parents will feel heard, valued, and more confident in communicating with school leadership. This will lead to increased trust, stronger relationships, and a willingness to engage in future school initiatives.
Potential Challenges
- Low parent attendance: With busy schedules, lack of awareness, or feeling disconnected from school this could be the biggest problem I face.
- Limited parent participation: Parents may feel uncomfortable speaking up especially with the principal there. Difficulty turning feedback into action. I may not be able to do anything on my end and the principal could also run into that same issue.
- Lack of diverse representation: We are a very diverse district, but a lot of those parents do not attend things, which can limit perspectives.
Next Steps
My next steps would be to select 1 or 2 realistic, but short actionable suggestions that I can help with. Work on figuring out how I can implement those changes. I would follow that up with additional communication to parents. Eventually I would love to add more schools to this as well. I would host one or two most listening sessions or other type of sessions throughout the year.