If you clicked on this story, you’re probably someone who has been challenged with engaging families in schools. We hope you will find some guidance here as we offer our experiences from decades of working with families in schools.
We begin our work with schools by asking a series of questions, which typically triggers common responses. For example, we ask schools where they believe parent engagement begins, and often hear responses such as, “Back to School Night,” “Parent/Teacher conferences” or “When a parent is called about a child’s behavior.” We ask them which parents are not coming. Overwhelmingly, the response is “Black and Latino parents.” When asked what efforts were made, we hear, “We offer childcare, interpretation, translate flyers into Spanish, and we’ve even tried having meetings at different times during the day. Yet, they still don’t show up!”
This conversation reveals how dismayed and frustrated administrators and staff are with parents of color who are not attending or engaging with the school. We understand how putting forth this effort and not getting the desired results can be frustrating. We then conclude with the question, “Why do you believe these parents don’t come? The answers include, “Too many jobs, they work nights, language barrier, childcare, they have other priorities.''
We too noticed that even when schools respond to these issues by translating messages and flyers, providing childcare, switching up times of day for events, and often providing food, there is no significant change in their parent engagement outcome.
Ironically, we constantly hear Black and Latino parents express their frustration with the ways in which schools interact and attempt to engage them currently or in past experiences. The need to effectively engage parents of color will only continue to rise as demographics continue to change. Given this shift, we must move, with urgency, away from the “one size fits all” approaches to parent engagement.
There is a bright side! We have yet to enter a school where there weren’t good people (administrators and staff members) doing many great things and expending a lot of energy to engage all parents, particularly Black and Latino parents. If you’ve picked up this guide, we believe that you’re one of those educators. Yet, good educators can still have one or more of the parent engagement experiences previously described. You are also in good company if you too have thrown up your hands, even sarcastically with, “So, what do we do now?”
This guide is a result of the authors’ frustration with constantly hearing both educators and parents talk about the disconnect in their connections with one another. So 15 years ago, we too set out looking for answers. Our question was, “When Black and Latino parents do not engage or are uncomfortable engaging with schools, what are their reasons and what are the barriers?” Over the years, we have spoken to thousands of parents/groups, from Black to Vietnamese- immigrant families and American born.
One such group was called the Latino Parent Coffee group. Their meetings were held at their school once a week for several years. A mix of approximately 15-20 family members attended the meetings each week. The majority of the families were from Central American countries and came to the United States for various reasons and with varying levels of education and across socio-economic status. The lessons and perspectives we learned from our parent groups and dialogue circles with diverse parents and educators all provided important and sometimes surprising insight to what predominately gets in the way of schools effectively engaging all parents effectively, particularly Black and Latino families. To overcome these barriers, educators and parent leaders must:
Understand how our own culture and experiences impact our beliefs and practices.
Behave in ways that honor and validate families’ cultures and experiences even though they may be different than what dominant culture expects.
Provide meaningful and differentiated support for families whose needs are not being met.
This site is designed to help educators and parent leaders understand how to create a culturally responsive lens through all aspects of planning and implementation. It is designed to be used as a tool for specific engagement activities, and to use with professional development. We’ve divided the book into three parts:
Busy Educator’s Guide to Culturally Responsive Family Engagement -- Specific, easy-to-use tools to plan and implement effective culturally responsive engagement.
Back to School Night: The Board Game! -- Fun, quick game that helps create a shared understanding of the current structural barriers to engagement in their school and district.
Resources to Deepen Your Understanding -- Resources that can be used, over time, to deepen an educator's understanding of the historic and current racial and cultural issues that impact engagement in schools as well as how their own racial, ethnic, and cultural identity shapes the ways they engage with families.
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