Parents as Allies: Resources and relationships are growing at Duquesne City

The folks at Duquesne City schools know that it takes a village to raise a child. And they realize that it’s not just the community that needs to support and engage with the school district. The schools also need to connect with the community.

That thinking inspired Duquesne City to join Parents as Allies (PAA), a family-school engagement project run by Kidsburgh. It has had a powerful impact. During two years of creative brainstorming and testing new approaches, Duquesne’s PAA team has helped the school district build strong relationships with students, parents and even grandparents in their growing and evolving community.

Students benefit when their families are engaged with their school, says Duquesne City’s K-8 principal, George Little.

So tackling the subject of family-school engagement was important, Little says, in order “to build a foundation to ensure that our students and families get what they need.”

WHAT DID THEY TRY? 

One early hack was simple but powerful: The school began sending positive messages about students to their parents and caregivers. Says Little: “Receiving a positive note from school helps make it more comfortable for parents to go to the school and to get involved.”

As those positive notes began arriving, the school found that parents wanted to be more connected. They wanted to know more about their children’s teachers, the people sending these encouraging notes.

So Little, parent co-lead Le’Tresha Dean and the rest of their PAA team began dreaming up an event that helped build a personal connection between parents and teachers.

They surveyed parents to find out what they needed, then organized a resource fair for families. This evening event, scheduled the same day as parent-teacher conferences, brought together local organizations that help with things like financial literacy and mental health. Free dinner was served. And to make sure they were advocating for the district’s growing population of families new to English, they also arranged for translators at the event.

Many parents attended, and many more heard about the event and were interested in connecting. Teachers appreciated that the event was intentionally planned on parent-teacher conference day. They could talk about student achievement as well as the resources that Duquesne City was offering to parents. Everyone was getting something they needed.

“The most rewarding thing for our team,” Little says, “was that we understood the importance of what we were doing for the community.”

Since then, Duquesne City has expanded its resource fair events to bring in more community organizations and has begun including a job fair. The PAA team has also created the Duke Showcase event giving parents an opportunity to see the work of their students and hear from teachers about how hard the students have worked.

To emphasize that the Duke Showcase and the school district itself are student-directed, parents were greeted by students rather than by school staff. And the community was central to the festivities: Local daycare centers had staff helping with the bounce house, one of the school security guards served as DJ and a band made up of musicians who were students in the district 20 years ago performed for the crowd.

WHAT WOULD THEY TELL OTHER SCHOOLS? 

• Start by gathering data. What do families need? “Listen to the parents,” says Dean, and let their feedback drive what you do.
• Be transparent. Let the parents and caregivers in your community know that you’re trying to build strong relationships with them.
• Look for strengths you can build on. “Tap into the natural resources that you already have,” says Little.
• Stick with this work, because it matters.  “You have to hang in there and keep going,” Dean says. “Perseverance with a passion — you have to really care about these students, their outcomes and their future.”

Since early 2021, Parents as Allies has helped more than two dozen school districts in southwestern Pennsylvania build engagement with families with support from the Grable Foundation. As the project enters its fourth year, we are sharing innovative hacks and fresh ideas from these districts to help families and schools in our region and around the world connect more deeply and support each other more fully. This story is one in a series chronicling these parent-school engagement discoveries. Stay tuned for more stories throughout the coming months.