Parents as Allies: New Brighton finds that communication is the key to collaboration

Photos courtesy of Parents as Allies/New Brighton.

Both sides wanted to talk more. That’s where it all started.

When the New Brighton Area School District began working with the Parents as Allies (PAA) family-school engagement project in 2021, they were seeking to forge a better connection with the parents in their community.

The parents, too, were eager to connect. So New Brighton’s PAA team, made up of school staff and parents who co-led the process of building better engagement, dove in and began doing “empathy interviews.”

Many things surfaced, including a strong desire by the parents for more direct, easy-to-access communication from the school district. With direct involvement from the district’s superintendent and a motivated team of parents and school staff, progress was soon at hand.

WHAT DID THEY TRY?

An early change: using one consistent mode of communication to reach all elementary school families. New Brighton opted for the online platform Class Dojo, which is popular among districts nationwide. It’s a place where teachers can communicate directly with families, and school administrators can post updates and invitations.

Events were another priority – and one that parents had a lot to say about.

Ideally, parents said, the elementary building’s Back-to-School Night would happen right before school began, so that families could get to know teachers before the fall semester got rolling.

In some ways, that would be appealing for teachers. When Back-to-School Night happens in late September, some parents are already looking for an academic update on their child, even though school has been in session for just a month. And it can be a lot of pressure for teachers to showcase a perfectly neat classroom when students were busy learning in the space hours earlier.

But the PAA team hit a roadblock: The teachers’ contract stipulated they can’t be required to host a Back-to-School event during the final days of summer break.

So the team devised practical solutions. The elementary school was able to shift the event from late September to early in the month.

And they dreamed up a different kind of event to kick off the new school year in August 2022 — a resource fair and celebration that brought together more than 20 community organizations, from music schools and municipal sports leagues to houses of worship and the local historical society.

Many teachers volunteered to attend —. more than 25 of the school’s 45. So many kids did get to meet the teachers they would have for 2022-2023.

Families loved it. About 250 kids and their families attended, nearly half of New Brighton’s elementary school population.

Since then, New Brighton has continued building on these strong relationships with families. And they’ve seen promising signs of success.

“We think about how parent engagement can correlate with student academic success,” says New Brighton elementary principal Jason Hall. “Attendance has increased at school because of the different family-school engagement successes.”

WHAT WOULD THEY TELL OTHER SCHOOLS?

• It’s worth it to make family-school engagement a high priority. “It helps me personally, but you can’t quantify what it does for the families and students,” Hall says.
• Having a good support staff is important. They help make the ideas happen.
• Grappling with family engagement requires trust among your team. You can’t immediately discount an idea. You need to have a “we can do this” attitude. (And unexpected ideas can be wonderful. Someone suggested making waffles with the students on the final day of summer school. It’s now become a tradition that makes people happy at New Brighton. Last summer they made 100 waffles.)
• Teacher involvement is vital. But given how much teachers are already doing, one of the goals is to make events and other requests less cumbersome for the teachers.

Since 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.