Recruitment & Retention Toolkit

“This guide aims to provide useful strategies, tips, and ready-to-print templates that will help your program recruit and retain participants. There are culturally responsive practices included throughout the guide.”

Case Study: Cajon Valley Union School District

This case study from the Brookings Institute’s Playbook for Family-School Engagement describes how one school district strategically hired multilingual staff to serve as community liaisons and support family engagement. The case study describes the process for hiring these caregivers, as well as the district’s 8-week parent university, family-teacher teams, annual family engagement survey, and Parent Teacher Home Visits.

Building Relationships Bridging Cultures: Cultural Brokering in Family Engagement

“Drawing on previous research and a comparative case study, this brief describes cultural brokers—individuals who acts as bridges between families and schools—and three promising strategies they used to engage families, especially those farthest from opportunities, in their children’s education: parent capacity building; culturally-specific relationship building; and systemic capacity building. We offer recommendations for cultural brokering …

Case Study: EdNavigator

This case study from the Brookings Institute’s Playbook for Family-School Engagement describes how EdNavigator, a nonprofit agency based in New Orleans, uses creative strategies to connect families and schools. Strategies include developing “congratulations packets” to build trust between families and schools and using navigators to help parents make decisions for their students.

Panorama Family-School Relationships Survey

“Research shows that when schools successfully engage families, students earn higher grades, score higher on tests, develop better social skills, and are more likely to graduate. The Family-School Relationships Survey was developed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to provide schools with a clear picture of family attitudes about several key topics.”

Family Friendly Website Checklist

“This checklist is designed to aid schools in updating and creating professional school websites to meet student, family and community needs, while addressing ADA accessibly standards.”

Recasting Families and Communities as Co-Designers of Education in Tumultuous Times

“This policy memo, jointly released by the National Education Policy Center and the Family Leadership Design Collaborative, explores how justice-based approaches to family engagement can enable parents and families, particularly from communities of color, to contribute as fellow leaders in transforming schools and educational systems to better serve all children, families, and communities.” Authors: Ann …

Principal Connection / Swimming with Your Shoes On (ASCD)

This ASCD article digs into how school leaders can support educators in  improving communication with caregivers and families. This article encourages educational leaders to pose the questions: “When was the last time you focused a professional development session on parent-teacher conferences? Or led teachers in reflecting on the effectiveness of their parent conferences and what they …

Added to Action Planning Tool

Check out the Resource Library

Our online library has hundreds of practitioner-friendly resources to support putting evidence into practice.