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As confident as leaders may feel about spearheading new student success initiatives, assuming parent engagement is a given may be unwise. Jennifer Miller, a child development consultant and coach, often senses tension when mediating conversations between educators, parents and students.

“So often the elephant in the room is trust,” says Miller, who’s also the author of . “There can be a real lack of trust surrounding how we can contribute to making sure that our children thrive.”

As educators work to reverse learning loss and behavioral declines in the wake of the pandemic, districts are ramping up outreach efforts to win back buy-in, collaboration and engagement from two of the most important players in students’ development: their parents and the community.

‘Humanizing’ your district

Survey responses from 1,000 community members across the Visalia Unified School District in Tulare County, California, indicated that in 2022, they held a 20% confidence rate in its incoming superintendent, Kurt Shrum. Shrum was the fourth superintendent in six years to take over a conservative-leaning district fraught with campus violence and rigorous activism related to the Black Lives Matter Movement.

“If you’re not telling your story, someone else will,” says Andre Pecina, Visalia’s former head communications strategist.

Pecina worked diligently on “humanizing” Superintendent Kirk Shrum to parents and community members through a multi-pronged campaign involving digital communications and door-to-door outreach, tapping feedback from Visalia’s two unincorporated communities and one migrant camp.

The campaign, which generated over 20,000 engagements, boosted Shrum’s confidence rate by 66 percentage points and helped the district win an award for outstanding public relations from the California School Board Association.

“People will bash their district, but they won’t bash their neighbor,” says Pecina, now the superintendent of Corcoran Joint Unified School District just 50 miles south of Visalia.

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But communication—and by extension, trust—is a two-way street. One of Miller’s most important objectives is strengthening district leaders’ empathy for the challenges parents and students face in the family environment. By doing so, she hopes educators and parents can co-create learning objectives that transcend district-defined measures of student success.

“Self-management and executive functioning are higher-order thinking skills that parents have to manage at home, and it’s absolutely critical in the classroom for educators,” she says.

Empowering parents for student success

Earnest conversations surrounding student development between districts, parents and community members can only work if the latter two feel like their contributions can make a difference, says Kimi Kean, CEO of Families in Action, a nonprofit dedicated to eliminating education disparities across Oakland, California. “It’s really about rebalancing class and power. The principal feels powerful, but how do we imbue our parents with that same sense of investment and ownership?”

One of its four pillars, Lit for Literacy, involves strengthening parental involvement in their children’s reading development. Kean helps parents build a sense of agency by inviting superintendents to speak to them and “demystify the data” surrounding student success metrics. For example, just 60% of parents in Oakland report knowing if their children are performing at grade level in math or ELA. Invigorated by their newfound knowledge, parents learn about book walks, book talks, timed reading and other tutoring techniques.

“It isn’t about a random parent having these big ‘aha’ moments,” Kean says. “We’re helping schools build a team of family literacy champions who can continue leading at school.”

Nearly 90% of students whose parents became a family literacy champion saw between 30 and 100 points of reading growth last year, according to Kean. However, parents who may feel discouraged by their own lack of literacy or math skills should know that the most important aspect of tutoring is simply showing up.

“You do not need to understand the novel that they’re taking in English literature,” Miller of Confident Parents says. “What you do need to do is support your child when they want to give up.”

Gaining the entire community

In California, public school districts must translate all official communications when 15% or more of students speak a primary language other than English. But Pecina, superintendent of Corcoran Unified, sees their 3% Yemenis population as a population worth catering to.

“Even though some populations may fall below the threshold, that shouldn’t dictate the way we engage our community,” he says.