Encouraging Parent Involvement–Without Straining The Budget

Communicator
March 2018, Volume 41, Issue 7

Family engagement is an essential strategy to help improve overall student achievement. NAESP’s recent #WebinarWednesday shows principals and school communities how to encourage parent involvement without increasing your school budget. The webinar, “Encouraging Parent Involvement–Without Straining The Budget,” featured Project Appleseed’s founder and president, Kevin Walker.

When a principal realizes the importance in parental participation—a form of social capital—student academic improvements progress, significantly. Use these cost-effective strategies to develop or boost your parental involvement plan at your school.

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Effectively Plan Your Open House. Open house and parent night is an opportunity to sell your school. Start early to plan out your open house in order to illustrate and familiarize ways parents can become involved.

Get Parent Feedback. Find out where parents are in their child’s education. Knowing this can better help principals offer sufficient ways in which parents can volunteer.

Create a Parental Involvement Report Card. This is a self-diagnostic tool of questions that help parents navigate their involvement and gives them an operative barometer on how they’re engaging.

Identify Parent’s Special Skills. Find out what special skills parents have and integrate them into the curriculum to help students become more engaged and learn.

Don’t Forget Fathers. Ask dad’s to do more. Participation from fathers should be pushed in school messaging and during school events. In addition, in low-income schools, create customizable and welcoming volunteer opportunities for fathers to feel comfortable to get involved.

Download the presentation or view the full webinar here. This webinar is in part of NAESP’s Webinar Wednesday series each month.

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