America's Promise Alliance

Organizing for Effective Parent Engagement

Forming a Parent Engagement Team

It is our hope that communities will be able to use the Toolkit and the 3A framework to bring a more intentional family strengthening and parent engagement focus to dropout prevention. To maximize effectiveness, it is critical that key stakeholders work together to develop a shared vision and common understanding for how to engage parents in dropout prevention.This section presents a brief overview of how to create a parent engagement team that will help to ensure that parent voice is brought into the summit planning or any dropout prevention activity.

• Included is a sample annotated agenda for a parent engagement meeting where your parent engagement team can convene parent-serving organizations and parents in discussions about ways to bring parents and caregivers into the summit planning and action plan development.
• A blank version of a grid identifying what key stakeholders can do to support a child’s educational success – this can be used as a tool to solicit ideas from parents and parent-serving organizations.

 

Soliciting Perspectives on Dropout Prevention

This section provides tools that can be used to solicit perspectives from parents about the dropout issue and how parents can become partners in addressing it.  These tools include:

• A parent survey asking how parents are currently involved in their child’s education and the additional resources that they might need.
• A teacher survey asking teachers how they are engaged with parents of the children in their classes.
• A proposed design for parent focus groups for gathering parent perspectives on what the barriers and challenges are to ensuring children succeed in school and do not drop-out.  

 

Infusing Parent Voice in Your Dropout Prevention Summit

• This section provides suggestions on how to bring parent voice into the summit design and sample agendas from two summits illustrate different ways to bring parent voice into the summit

 

Infusing Parent Engagement in Your Dropout Prevention Action Plan

Every city and state hosting a summit will also be developing a dropout prevention action plan.  This section provides:

• Ideas on how infuse in those plans an ongoing focus on parent engagement and involvement, including examples of parent-focused strategies that communities might generate.