Starting Points
Welcome to the Standard: Welcoming All Families Into the School Community as part of your path to create a welcoming school climate, and building a respectful and inclusive school community.
Use the resources included here as a starting point to strengthen identified needs in your Action Plan in the area of Welcoming All Families Into the School Community. The Guide to Using the Toolkit includes background information and suggested steps for implementing the Standards for Family-School Partnerships.
Welcoming All Families into the School Community
The school culture strongly impacts family engagement. The goals in this standard focus on the creation of a welcoming school climate and the importance of building a trusting and respectful relationships with families.
Schools and districts maintain and improve their welcoming and encouraging environment by purposefully monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and action planning, to ensure that the school environment and atmosphere are inviting and that families feel welcomed, engaged, important, and involved in the education of their children.
There are two main goals for Welcoming All Families
Creating a welcoming environment:
- When families approach the school building they should feel they belong.
- Are there opportunities for families to develop relationships and communicate with school staff that serve their children?
- Is the atmosphere family-friendly and reflective of the cultures and languages of the community?
- Are there many ways to volunteer and participate in children’s education even for parents who may be working two jobs or who don’t speak English or have a car?
Build a respectful, inclusive school community:
School policies and programs should reflect and respect the diversity of the families in the community.
- Does the school staff work with families to identify and address barriers to involvement (such as differences of income, education, language, and culture)?
- Are events open to the whole family and offered at convenient times and places?
Action Steps
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: Welcoming All Families Into the School Community to carefully examine characteristics of this standard and where you see yourselves in practices connected to creating a welcoming climate and practices. Continue to use the rubric to evaluate growth and progress toward goals for this standard.
- Orient yourself to this toolkit section on Welcoming All Families Into the School Community and consider how the tools and resources can support an Action Plan addressing a welcoming and respectful school climate. Continue to use the rubric to evaluate growth and progress toward goals for this standard.
- 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
- Ask school staff and other parents 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: Welcoming All Families Into the Community.
- Become familiar with the Toolkit tools and resources.
- Participate in required Parent Advisory Teams for state and federal school level programs.
- Greet other parents at school activities and events; sit with someone you don’t know and get to know them.
- Help to recruit bilingual parents to greet and interpret for families whose first language isn’t English. Ask the school district to provide translation headsets for parent meetings.
- Offer family activities at low or no cost so everyone can participate; budget parent group and programs with family engagement requirements funds for this purpose.
- Work to change the conversations going on over the back fence. If people complain or use ethnic slurs, stay positive and point out the contributions all families can make to the community.
- Hold meetings in a variety of community locations (e.g., the local library, a chapter house, a community center, a church, a local restaurant, to make them accessible to all.
- Work with school staff to designate a bulletin board or hallway to designate as a family celebration area.
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: Welcoming All Families Into the School Community with a team of stakeholders including parents, teacher, administrators to identify strengths and needs for the school in practices and policies that allow for welcoming all families.
- 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: Welcoming All Families Into the School Community.
- Map and consider the school’s parent-teacher contacts: How often do teachers and families communicate with each other, what are the main topics, and when do they have face-to-face contact?
- Work with the school council to develop customer service guidelines to be used by school staff. See the sample checklist included below in Resources and Tools.
- Engage in outreach to ensure that activities include families that are not as involved, may be hard to reach, and whose voices are not commonly heard.
- Set up a parent help desk or visitor welcome center outside the school office.
- Conduct meet-and-greet walks in the neighborhoods where students live.
- Use professional development time and professional learning communities to address assumptions about families and professional practices in working with families of students in the school community.
- Explore the need for and feasibility of establishing a family resource center in the school.
- Work with parents and staff to designate a bulletin board or hallway to designate as a family celebration area.
- Be accessible, available, and with tolerance for families with various points of view. It’s one thing to say families are welcome and valued, but it’s another thing to show it.
- Leverage resources and seek funding to invest in programs with educational and action oriented curriculums and opportunities for families and school staff such as the Family Leadership Institutue, Abriendo Puertas, NMPTA, After School Learning, CESDP and NMPED Toolkit Use Technical Assistance, and other programs focused on student success.
Resources and Tools
School Level Reflection Rubric: Welcoming All Families Into the School Community
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 practices that create a welcoming and respectful school climate by marking the box that most clearly matches what you are doing now. Reflect on the results as you plan and focus efforts on welcoming all families.
School Level Starting Points Inventory: Family, School, and Community Partnerships
Use the Inventory with a team to review the School Level Starting Points Inventory: Family, School, and Community Partnerships 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 Welcoming All Families Into the School Community
The goal of creating a welcoming environment and building a respectful school community 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:
- Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Practices and Policies for Family Engagement
- Tips for Developing a School and District Policy on Family-School Partnerships
- Family Engagement in Title I, Indian Education, Special Education, Bilingual Education: Alignment with State and Federal Requirements
- Ideas to Promote Trusting Relationships Between Schools and Every Family
- Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Guidance and Resources
- Fatherhood Initiatives: Make Room for Dads and Grandads
- Photos, Videos, and Featured Effective Practices