The Family Engagement Roadmap
A Practical Guide for School System Leaders to Build Enduring Family Partnerships
Start your journey
Your path to improving family engagement across your system starts here. Let’s go!
Build your Foundation
First, strengthen mindsets that power effective family engagement.
Make the Case
Then, demonstrate the impact of family engagement and bring others along.
Take Action
Finally, transform family engagement across your system with actionable strategies.
Don’t know where to start?
Begin by reflecting on your system’s current practices. It’s not a scorecard, but a helpful way to know which section to prioritize.
Download the scorecard here to reflect with your leadership team.1 of 3
Build your foundation
Strengthening family engagement starts with shared beliefs. Everyone across your system believes that families can, and should, be partners in their child’s education.
Reflect on the questions below. If you answer “yes,” what evidence supports your response?
- Does our system demonstrate publicly that we believe that all families have the desire and ability to support their child’s success?
- Are family and community voices valued and accounted for when making decisions, both at the system and school level?
- Are families seen as partners in our system?
If you answer “no”, aren’t sure, or want to explore why asset-based mindsets matter, start with the Core Beliefs section. Here you’ll learn more about what beliefs support strong, system-wide family engagement and can explore resources to help foster these beliefs.
You’ve answered “yes” and feel that your system shares an asset-based belief that families are valued and that belief is put into practice. Now, you need to build your coalition to support this important work.
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Make the case
Once your system is grounded in asset-based beliefs about families, the next step is making sure that family engagement is understood as integral to student academic success.
Reflect on the questions below. If you answer “yes”, what evidence supports this response?
- Is family engagement widely recognized as a driver of student achievement across our system?
- Do our senior leaders and school board talk about the impact of family engagement on attendance, academic growth, and graduation?
- Does our system highlight the impact of family engagement publicly through data, stories, or lived experiences?
If you answered “no”, aren’t sure or want to learn about building allies for family engagement in your system, start with Making the Case. This section offers guidance on using data, stories, and strategies to build buy-in across the system.
You’ve answered “yes” and across your system, staff and decision makers know that family engagement is a strategy for whole school improvement. Now, reflect on how you are putting this work into action across your system.
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Take action
The final step is to implement evidence-based strategies to help educators, leaders, and families work in partnership to help students succeed.
Reflect on the questions below. If you answer “yes”, what evidence supports this response?
- Does our system leverage evidence-based strategies to put our family engagement beliefs into practice?
- Do we allocate resources, leverage staffing, and implement policies that help to support effective family-school partnerships?
- Is family engagement embedded into all core functions across the system?
To move from belief to action, explore the Family Engagement in Action section. You’ll find proven strategies, practical toolkits, and implementation guides to help operationalize family engagement across your system.
To move from belief to action, explore the Family Engagement in Action section. You’ll find proven strategies, practical toolkits, and implementation guides to help operationalize family engagement across your system.
What is Family Engagement?
Effective family engagement is the partnership between schools and families that promotes student success. We believe that family engagement starts with a trusting relationship and that the most successful academic partnerships are built on a strong foundation of trust and supported through ongoing communication. At Flamboyan Foundation we define that as REAL Family Engagement.
We use the word “Family” in this resource to mean any caring adult that supports a student’s academic and social emotional development. This can mean parents, guardians, grandparents, older siblings, foster parents and countless others. Students are also a member of the family and play a role in supporting their own education.
For the purpose of this resource, we define school system leader or system leader as someone who holds a leadership role within a school district, charter network, or broader educational system and is responsible for setting direction, shaping policies, and making decisions that impact multiple schools. This can include:
- Superintendents
- Assistant Superintendents
- Chiefs or Deputy Chiefs (e.g., of Academics, Family Engagement, Equity, or Operations)
- District Directors or Executive Directors
- Other central office leaders who influence system-wide strategy and implementation.
When it comes to family engagement, school system leaders are uniquely positioned to embed it into strategy, resource allocation, and accountability structures.
Family engagement is everyone’s job.
Every office, department, and individual plays a role in ensuring that family engagement is part of the system’s core work. When a system prioritizes meaningful family engagement, it becomes stronger, more responsive, and better able to accelerate student success. Here’s what it looks like when family engagement is incorporated into all school system functions.
The system communicates clearly and consistently with families, using language that is easy to understand, communicating in a families home language, and through multiple channels to ensure that all families have the information they need to engage. Communication is two-way by design, helping to build trust and creating regular opportunities for families to share feedback and ideas that can help schools better serve students, families and the community.
Across the system, family engagement is widely viewed as a core strategy for improving student learning and is reflected in the strategic plan. Success for family engagement initiatives is measured by meaningful outcomes like strong relationships, access to resources and information, and increased agency to advocate and guide their child’s educational journey, not just by activities or attendance. This commitment to family engagement is reflected in every decision, and every department understands how they contribute to the work of family engagement.
The system allocates the resources to effectively engage families, ensuring that money, time, attention, and staffing are aligned to support the high-quality implementation of best practices. This investment in family engagement is treated as a direct investment in student academic and social emotional success.
Family engagement is embedded in every district role and reinforced through talent and HR systems. Expectations related to family engagement, and the associated beliefs and practices, are reflected in job descriptions, hiring decisions, performance evaluations, and is woven into professional development for all staff. This means ensuring that family engagement is widely viewed as a critical component for every employee, not just one specific role related to family engagement for the system.
The system treats all families as essential partners in student learning and provides them with the information and resources to monitor progress and support learning at home. Families are empowered – receiving clear, timely information, insights, and guidance on what students are learning, how their children are progressing, and specific ways they can partner to support academic and social-emotional growth.
When a system works in partnership with families, families have access and information.
Learn more about the Five Roles.At Flamboyan, we have seen, and research shows, that families play five essential roles in their children’s education. This happens when systems create the conditions for school leaders and educators to work in partnership with families to provide access, resources and information that helps them successfully work together.
An important way families can help their child succeed is to consistently communicate high expectations for student performance. Teachers can help families by sharing information about milestones students should meet to be on a successful academic path.
Families can support their child’s success by regularly checking in with them and teachers. Teachers can support families by consistently and proactively engaging with them about student progress and by being available to families in a timely way.
When families support and reinforce learning at home, their children do better in school. Teachers can help families support learning at home with their children through consistent academic partnership and ongoing communication like helping families create a series of though provoking, content specific questions families can ask children at home.
Families play a critical role in navigating their child’s educational experience from preschool all the way through college. The school community can support families by connecting them to resources and activities for their child that support their unique needs.
Families advocate for their children to ensure they get the personal attention, necessary supports they need to be successful in school. School leadership can support family advocacy by creating a feedback friendly environment. This could include a family feedback system where families understand how their feedback was used, expanded office hours for family conversations, or proactively seeking input from families about school policy decisions.
Ready. Set. Engage.
Before you can build meaningful family partnerships, your district must first embrace and live out these core beliefs. These foundational principles should be shared by all system leaders and guide the behavior, decisions and actions of when it comes to families.
System Leaders believe that each and every family has the potential and desire to support their child’s success.
System Leaders believe that family and community voices are a critical part of informed decision making and that all voices have value.
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System Leaders believe that families are equal and valued partners in the education process, that they belong in leadership roles, and that their contributions are critical to the success of the school system.
System leaders believe that it is part of their role to establish a foundation of mutual respect and transparency between schools and families.
Family Engagement has a profound impact on student success, both academically and socially. Once your system is solid in asset-based beliefs about families, the next step is to make the case for family engagement with colleagues and decision makers in your system. The goal of these conversations is to help identify and solidify resources to support family engagement, such as funding or staff capacity.
When leaders can point to clear research and evidence that demonstrates the direct correlation between family engagement and improved student outcomes, other decision-makers are more likely to allocate resources to support this work. Data helps make the case that family engagement is not just a “nice to have” but is a critical lever for school improvement. Identify what data points are most important to your school system and provide research highlights to support your case.
Among other things, family engagement is associated with:
- Reduced drop-out rates and higher graduation rates
- Increased student achievement
- Reduced chronic absenteeism.
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In addition to research data, another way to shift mindsets is through storytelling. Data helps tell your audience what is happening; stories help your audience understand why family engagement matters. By sharing real-life examples and success stories of the impact of family engagement on schools, students, and communities, decision-makers have an opportunity to reframe their own mindsets. When telling stories, think about the motivations of your colleagues or school board – what types of stories have helped shift mindsets in the past? Who are they most likely to want to hear from? Use this information to tailor your storytelling as an accompaniment to the data.
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While data and storytelling build pieces of the case for family engagement, one of the best ways to shift mindsets is to create a real-world experience for decision-makers to help them internalize the impact of family engagement. When people feel the impact of the work they are more likely to value it, allocate resources for it, and sustain it in a school district.
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You’ve established your values and built organizational buy-in. Now it’s time to bring family engagement to life. This is where mindsets transforms into meaningful action, creating the conditions for every family to be an equal partner in their child’s education.
Transform your approach through powerful strategies like home visits. Learn how to identify funding, train staff, and create meaningful connections.
Continue to foster family-educator partnerships by promoting two-way, positive, ongoing communication for every child in your district. Learn how to build systems-level support to help open up lines of communication between educators and families.
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Evolve your system’s approach to academic partnering through revamped engagements such as Academic Parent Teacher Teams, Student Led Conferences, and more. Learn how to build the conditions to help all families support their child’s learning and monitor their child’s progress.
Take the Next Step
The journey doesn’t end here. It’s just beginning.
Share Your Progress
Inspire other systems by sharing your family engagement journey on social media. Use hashtag #FamilyEngagementRoadmap
Share Progress
Support the Movement
Join our network to help share how family engagement is changing your system and engage with other like-minded leaders on best practices.
Support the Movement
About Flamboyan Foundation
Guided by the belief that all children deserve the opportunity to live a fulfilling life, the Flamboyan Foundation works to ensure students most impacted by inequity are prepared to succeed in school and beyond.
Visit Flamboyan Foundation