Starting Points
Welcome to the Standard: Supporting Student Success as part of your path to ensure that families and school staff continuously collaborate to support students’ learning and healthy development both at home and at school, and have regular opportunities to strengthen their knowledge and skills to do so effectively.
Use the resources included here as a starting point to strengthen identified needs in your Action Plan in the area of Supporting Student Success. The Guide to Using the Toolkit includes background information and suggested steps for implementing the Standards for Family-School Partnerships.
Supporting Student Success
The focus is on families and school staff continuously collaborating to support students’ learning and healthy development both at home and at school, and have regular opportunities to strengthen their knowledge and skills to do so effectively.
Parent involvement in children’s education has an impact on student success, not just in school but throughout life. When families are involved, students:
- Earn higher grades;
- Attend school more regularly;
- Enjoy school more and behave better; and
- Are more likely to go on to postsecondary education.
However, to become engaged in ways that boost student achievement, many families need information and encouragement from school staff and parent group leaders.
There are two goals for Supporting Student Success
Share information about student progress.
Families should be informed of how their children are doing in school, as well as how the entire school is progressing. Questions that this standard addresses include:
- Do parents and teachers communicate about student progress?
- Do parents learn what good work looks like for their child’s age and grade?
- Does the school use assessment and test results to inform parents which student skills need strengthening? Tests such as ACCESS Language Proficiency, PARCC Tests, Classroom Assessments, and others as appropriate.
Support learning by engaging families.
Families should be active participants in their children’s learning at home and at school.
- Are families invited to observe their children’s classrooms, visit the school, and support student learning at school and/or home?
- How do schools help families strengthen learning at home?
- What after-school learning opportunities are there? What are the needs for these?
Action Steps
What Parents and School Staff Can Do to Support Student Success
GETTING STARTED
- Engage as a team with parents and community members to follow the steps included in a Guide for Using the Toolkit.
- Use the School Level Reflection Rubric: Supporting Student Success to carefully examine characteristics of effective practices and where you see yourselves in your practices connected to family engagement and supporting student success. Continue to use the rubric to evaluate growth and progress toward goals for this standard.
- Orient yourself to this toolkit section on Supporting Student Success and consider how the tools and resources can support your Action Plan.
- Review and consider state and federal program requirements for family engagement and professional development: such as Title I Family Engagement Policies, Indian Education, English Learner Family Engagement requirements, and Special Education requirements.
WHAT PARENTS AND PARENT LEADERS CAN DO
- 1. Ask school staff about using the Toolkit for New Mexico School Communities: Family, School, and Community Partnerships as part of a process to evaluate programs, use surveys and school level assessment tools found in the Toolkit such as the School Level Starting Points: Family, School, and Community Partnerships Inventory and the School Level Reflection Rubric: Supporting Student Success.
- Become familiar with the Toolkit tools and resources.
- Make extra efforts to ensure that communication and school activities are responsive to the cultural and linguistic diversity of the school community.
- Participate in required Parent Advisory Teams for state and federal school level programs.
- Collaborate with school staff to develop a checklist and tip sheets for effective parent-teacher conferences.
- Work with school leadership to conduct workshops on interpreting standardized test data.
- Invite teachers and professionals from the community to speak at meetings on various topics.
- Provide workshops for parents and students on topics such as study skills, individual curriculum areas, and college and career planning.
- Provide parent involvement tips and suggestions through meetings, sports events, events at the school, the school website, signs at the school and articles in the local newspaper.
- Refer to the resources below for use in family centers and other family accessible locations.
WHAT SCHOOL LEADERS AND STAFF CAN DO
- Engage as a team with parents and community members to follow the steps included in a Guide for Using the Toolkit.
- Reflect on the results of the School Level Reflection Rubric: Supporting Student Success with a team of stakeholders including parents, teachers, and administrators to identify strengths and needs for the school in practices and policies that allow for student success.
- Review and consider state and federal program requirements for family engagement and professional development: such as Title I Family Engagement Policies, Indian Education, English Learner Family Engagement requirements, and Special Education requirements.
- With a team, collaboratively develop your Action Plan for implementing strategies aimed at this standard: Supporting Student Success
- Make extra efforts to ensure that communication and school activities are responsive to the cultural and linguistic diversity of the school community.
- Work with the parent group to establish guidelines for regular communication between home and school (e.g., monthly calls from teachers to parents, home visits, weekly newsletters).
- Engage school staff, community members, and parents in developing a parent handbook.
- Establish a method for parents to review their children’s work on a regular basis. For example, use the internet or manila envelopes to send student work home each week; have a place for parent comments.
- Publicize the hours when administrators and teachers are available for parent visits and any procedures for contacting teachers on the telephone or in writing.
- Make use of all channels of communication: cable television, newspapers, radio, automated phone systems, text messaging, school and parent group websites, etc.
Identify parents, community members, community service organizations, and businesses that can help strengthen home-school communication. - Make sure all information is communicated in languages and formats to reach all parents.
- Sponsor events that allow educators and parents to interact socially, in addition to parent-teacher conferences and regular school meetings.
- Leverage resources and seek funding to invest in programs with educational and action oriented curriculums and opportunities for families and school staff such as Family Leadership Institutue, Abriendo Puertas, NMPTA, After School Learning and other programs.
Resources and Tools
School Level Reflection Rubric: Supporting Student Success
Use this rubric to help evaluate how well your school partners with families and community to support student success. Think about where you see yourself in the process and strategies you use to improve communication by marking the box that most clearly matches what you are doing now. Reflect on the results as you plan and focus efforts on effective communication.
School Level Starting Points Inventory: Family, School, and Community Partnerships
Use the Inventory with a team to review the School Level Starting Points: Family, School, and Community Partnerships Inventory to assess your strengths and needs around engagement within your school community and current practices for improving school climate.
Puntos de inicio para inventario a nivel escolar sobre la familia, escuela y socios comunitarios
Family/Community Survey
This is one family survey example based on the six areas of National Standards for Family-School Partnerships. Use this sample to personalize or modify for your school.
Encuesta Familiar Asociaciones Familia, Escuela, y Comunidad
School Staff Survey
This survey focused on family engagement can be used to help with professional development and action planning for building strong partnerships between families, schools, and the community.
Action Plan Template
The Toolkit provides a number of action steps for collecting data and ideas for developing an action plan. Use the Action Plan template to document your goals, objectives, and timelines.
Sample Action Plan
Use this sample to help guide your action plan development based on the six Standards for Family-School Partnerships.
Student Survey
Use this survey with students to help guide your action plan development based on the six Standards for Family-School Partnerships.
(PDF coming soon)
Family Friendly Schools Walkthrough Checklist
The checklist is designed to allow schools to assess their “family friendly” practices. This tool gives school leaders the opportunity to evaluate how inviting and “customer friendly” their school is to families and the community. It can also help to point out various areas that may have been previously overlooked and can be easily addressed.
Lista de revisión para ambiente familiar en las escuelas
Effective Practices: Quick Tips for Supporting Student Success
The goal of sharing information and building trusting relationships between school, families, and communities is reflected in the practices listed here.
Clave al Éxito
This web-based resource can be very useful for school wide use and inclusion on web site. Everything is in English and Spanish and it includes grade guides, reading log tools, a parent-teacher translator communicator tools, multimedia parent academies, current tips and news, resources for parents and teachers with EL students and students with learning exceptionalities in special education.
Clave al Éxito
Este recurso basado en la red puede ser muy útil de amplio uso en la escuela, inclusive en el sitio en la red. Todo está en Ingles y en Español e incluye guía de grados, herramientas de registro de lecturas, herramientas de comunicación o traductor padre-maestro, academias multimedia para padres, pistas nuevas y actuales, recursos para padres y maestros con estudiantes de EL y estudiantes de aprendizaje excepcional y educación especial.
Guide to New Mexico State and Federal Program Requirements for Family Engagement
- Bilingual Education
- Title I
- Indian Education
- Special Education
- After School Programs
(coming soon)
More Coming soon:
- All About Homework
- Top Websites to Include on School Websites on Student Success
- College and Career Readiness
- Grandparents raising Grandchildren
- Measuring the Cultural and Linguistic Responsiveness of Your School and Classroom
- Professional development opportunities for building effective family-school partnerships programs for student success.
- Media awareness, Internet Safety
- NMPED FAQ