While the blog goes on summer vacation, we’ll spend the next weeks sharing past blog posts about how City Connects helps students thrive.
This week’s roundup looks at how City Connects Coordinators work hard to promote family engagement. Addressing parents’ needs and engaging them in the life of schools is an important way to promote student success.
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Customizing services by building trust with families
April 26, 2018
At City Connects, we don’t just connect students to services, we connect them to a customized set of services and enrichment opportunities that meet their individual needs.
At the heart of this work is a core task: building trust with families.
Coordinators use this combination of customization and trust to help families through challenging times. This means learning how best to engage and support kids; cutting through bureaucratic red tape; and sharing insights and resources with parents. Coordinators might help a family get beds or guide immigrants who don’t speak English through the healthcare system. Our goal is to strengthen families so that students have everything they need to thrive.
This work starts early. And it continues for as long as students are at school.
“It takes time to warm the parents up to the fact that I and everyone in the school is supporting the family and not attacking parents for not parenting perfectly,” says Julie Vogel, the coordinator at the Paul A. Dever Elementary School.
Part of Vogel’s strategy is to reach out to parents about positive things. It might be getting clothes from Cradles to Crayons or sharing other information. “I get to be a positive person reaching out to them, and that usually starts a positive relationship.”
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Family engagement at City Connects
September 26, 2019
“Just about every month of the school year, there is something we do here at the early childhood center for family engagement,” Stephanie Sanabria, the City Connects Coordinator at Springfield’s Early Childhood Education Center says.
“Because the children are so young, they are closely tied to their parents, so we need parents’ participation and support. You can’t separate that out. That’s why the positive relationship that we form is so important.”
And since Sanabria is in a preschool setting, her family engagement efforts are fun and varied.
There’s Pumpkin Night in October and an evening of building gingerbread houses in December. In August, Sanabria will sometimes accompany teachers on home visits to provide Spanish language support.
“What I always love in the evening events is that when a family shows up and they come with their other children, I get a better sense of the whole family. And I’m always like ‘wow, this is your brother.’ And children get really excited. They say, this is my mom, this is my little brother, this is my big sister. The result is a stronger positive connection happens.”
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City Connects: building relationships between schools and families
October 20, 2022
To improve outcomes for kids, the City Connects model looks at four domains: academics, social/emotional behavior, physical health, and family.
Our focus on family is essential because parents and caregivers are key partners in students’ development and success. Families help City Connects Coordinators understand what students’ strengths and needs are.
As our 2022 Progress Report explains, “City Connects believes that schools are the epicenter of support for children and families.” Putting services and supports in schools makes them easier to access. And we know that supporting adults who may need help getting their children winter clothes or health care services also helps students. In short, when a family is doing well, children are more likely to do well.
One example of a coordinator’s work with a student and his family is Julian, a student featured in our progress report. A fourth grader in a City Connects school, Julian had two strengths: his academics and his mother’s engagement with his school.
However, “At the same time, Julian experienced significant difficulty with behavioral regulation in the classroom. He frequently disrupted lessons and activities, which not only impacted Julian’s ability to learn, but presented a challenge for his teacher and his peers.”
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Raising parents’ voices in Gary, Indiana
July 14, 2023
Last August, when Valerie Oliveras became the City Connects Coordinator at Banneker Elementary at Marquette in Gary, Ind., there was no parent-teacher organization. So Oliveras set out to get to know families and elevate their voices in the school — but first she had to explain what her job was.
“Initially it was challenging. Everyone just assumed that I was a DCS worker,” Oliveras says, referring to Indiana’s Department of Child Services. For support, Oliveras relied on her colleagues at the Banneker and at Marian University, the Technical Assistance Center for City Connects in the Midwest. And she kept reaching out. “I had to start building rapport with families, and I had to show them what I could do, what true support could look like.”
To do this, Oliveras used a strategy she learned while she was working in Massachusetts. “My mentor instilled in me this great responsibility to respect the space that I’m coming into. So for the first six months, I sat with people. I listened and observed. I did simple things like being part of the drop-off line in the morning and saying ‘Hi.’ I made sure that any time there was a parent around, I introduced myself to them.”
She began to say, “I’m just here to be helpful. That’s my job. I’m the Banneker school’s helper, and that will look different for every family.”
