How School Leaders Can Build Authentic Parent Engagement

Introduction: The Positive Relationship

Parent engagement in their children’s school lives correlates positively to improved academic achievement and healthier and happier children. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) outlines several reasons why parent involvement is essential in their action plan. These reasons include better student behavior and attendance, enhanced social skills, and better academic performance. CDC also states several health benefits stemming from parent engagement in their children’s school life. The benefits include more physical activity overall and a healthier lifestyle with fewer experiments with alcohol and cigarettes. 

Students’ health behavior and academic achievements correlate, and the significant impact comes from home and parent’s involvement in their child’s school life. CDC states clearly that parents’ engagement in their children’s school life significantly improves their health, well-being, and academic achievement.

Let’s take a look at some steps that school leaders can take to authentically reach out and engage parents.

Increase Parent Engagement by Examining Any Bias

Several barriers may prevent authentic parent engagement, and many research papers have examined this bias. For instance, the school culture may be ingrained with outdated views on parents’ role in the school. There may be thinking that parents belong outside the school and should be receivers of information rather than be engaged as active partners. Teachers may also have conscious or unconscious biases about parents that may have racial, cultural, or socioeconomic roots. A school may see parent engagement as a burden rather than approaching parent engagement as a type of relationship that reduces teachers’ workload and improves academic outcomes.

Patrice Fenton has examined ways to activate authentic parental engagement. She differentiates between “parental involvement” and “parental engagement”. In parental involvement, parents’ activity levels at school are primarily structured by schools. In contrast, with parental engagement, parents have a more active voice in how they participate in what goes on in schools. She refers to educational scholar Joyce Epstein’s statement, “If educators view students as children, they are likely to see both the family and the community as partners with the school in children’s education and development”. This attitude shift can unlock the parents’ role as valuable members of the community: parents do not hinder the school’s work but rather enrich community relationships by sharing their culture. Getting to know the parents also allows educators to tap into parents’ knowledge about their children. Access the entire article here.

Focus on Genuine, Authentic Engagement

In their book Building Parent Engagement in Schools (2009), authors Larry Feriazzo and Lorie Hammond describe how engaging with immigrant families and tapping into their cultural knowledge enriches the school community. Traditionally, immigrant or lower-income families may have been withdrawn from school’s regular volunteering activities due to cultural, language, or other barriers stemming from daily living circumstances. The authors use setting up and tending a school community garden as an example of a parent-led project that brings the community together. In their examples, the immigrant parents had far more experience with gardening techniques, gardening practices and tools than the school staff.

The project empowered the parents to take pride and share their cultural knowledge, which built valuable bridges between the school and home. Involving parents in their own way and not in stereotypical volunteering roles created authentic connections with the school. Feriazzo and Hammond emphasize that authentic engagement must stem from parents’ genuine interests to enrich the community.

Perceive Parents as Resourceful

Many research papers show that involving lower-income families to engage with their children’s education and school life improves academic achievement. For instance, a research by Harvard Family Institute explores how schools can also positively affect the home environment by boosting parent engagement and interest in the child’s learning. Their findings are fascinating and draw a picture of a dynamic partnership between the school and the parents. When the school directly engages more with parents, for instance, by involving them with homework assignments, the parents become more interested and engaged with their children’s learning.

To summarize, the research suggests perceiving students as children and their parents as resourceful, supportive community members and cultural representatives. This framework may enable an enriching relationship between the school and parents and result to breaking down some unwanted and biased cultural barriers.

Develop a Parent Engagement Action Plan 

CDS recommends implementing a Parent Engagement Action Plan to promote parent involvement in school. They suggest a special committee to be put in place to work on this plan.

The plan should address, examine, and meet the three goals:
1) What is needed for parents and schools to be connected?
2) How can schools engage parents in activities such as improving student health?
3) How do schools sustain parent engagement, maintain it, and address challenges?

The CDC’s advice for the action plan involves fostering a school culture that puts parents at the forefront. The school’s mission and vision statement should include parent involvement and engagement, and the school culture should authentically support these statements. Finally, the CDC recommends involving parents on the campus with volunteering opportunities and specially tailored school events. While CDC does not mention extending school’s involvement to the community, this outreach can be effective in building bridges between the local community and the school.

Use a School Communication Platform to Increase Engagement

School Signals supports the dynamic and highly valuable relationship between parents and the school. Our system can be your helpful operational platform for the Parent Engagement Action Plan committee. 

Consider the following features:

• Create a Parent Engagement Action Plan committee in School Signals to organize their work. The committee can schedule events and meeting times, reserve meeting spaces, and engage in lively online discussion. 
• Create family engagement surveys to map out any obstacles hindering parent engagement and to hear directly from parents.
• Give PTO / PTAs tools to communicate effectively
• Manage school events and collect RSVP
• Create volunteer opportunities

It is essential to note that using technology requires digital literacy, which not all parents may necessarily have. The school’s communication team should evaluate parents’ digital literacy and any obstacles in reaching out to families that are not comfortable with technology.

School Signals comes with built-in language translations. Still, language, cultural, and time barriers may play a role. Ensuring all families have a method to communicate and reach out is vital. Printing out news and providing them in paper format may be appropriate in some cases. The delivery reports also provide information on how information is received digitally.

Note (Feb 2, 2026): The link to the CDC guidelines is no longer available online.