The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
What have you learned from evaluating school-family-community partnership programs?
Harriet Feldlaufer and Judy Carson of the Connecticut State Department of Education, Wendy Harwin of CT Parents Plus, and Alex Nemeth from Holt, Wexler & Farnam write:
We evaluated school action teams that had participated in Connecticut's School-Family-Community Partnerships Training Program.¹ A School Action Team consists of teachers, a building principal, parents, and community members. Action teams use Joyce Epstein's Framework of Six Types of Family Involvement² as a guide to developing partnerships in support of student success. The six types of involvement include parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making, and collaborating with the community.
We collected data from over 40 teams throughout the state via phone surveys and site visits. Five schools identified by the survey as having successful action teams hosted focus groups.
From our evaluation we found that teamwork is essential. Action teams that started with a small, dedicated group and built over time were the most successful. Our evaluation also suggests that team members must be empowered to act and should be thanked often. Action teams ought to have opportunities for off-site meetings and provide avenues by which others in the school can contribute to their work. Most importantly, action teams should have fun working together.
Communication with families is also critical to team success. Successful teams take a family strengths approach. For example, teams might conduct surveys of family desires and skills at the outset of the work. Action teams must take care to send clear, consistent messages to parents that they are important, and that the school needs them in order to be successful. Using fellow parents as messengers, conducting home visits, making phone calls, using bilingual staff, and presenting to the larger community helped to establish two-way communication for many teams.
¹ An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Chicago.
² Epstein, J. L. (1995). School, family, community partnerships: Caring for the children we share. Phi Delta Kappan, 77, 701–712.
Harriet Feldlaufer and Judy Carson
Connecticut State Department of Education
Bureau of Early Childhood, Family and Student Services
25 Industrial Park Road
Middletown, CT 06457
Wendy Harwin
CT Parents Plus
United Way of Connecticut
Alex Nemeth
Holt, Wexler & Farnam, LLP
School-Family-Community Partnerships Project website: www.state.ct.us/sde/deps/Family/SFCP/index.htm