“We need more tools in the toolkit for our educators and for our principals to be able to respond to some of the social and emotional needs... Suspension and expulsion shouldn’t be the only tool that we pull out when we see behavioral issues.” - Roberto J. Rodríguez, assistant U.S. education secretary https://buff.ly/3VFsuTl

Parent and caregiver engagement is an ongoing process that integrates families into the life of the school in a variety of ways.

Tupac wrote a poem about a rose growing from the concrete. I think it is a perfect analogy for some of our most marginalized students. A rose is a rose whether it’s in someone’s hand or in a trash can. Help our students find the sunshine in their souls. I hope to build a garden.

Most Title I schools have a family engagement policy, but very few have a system focused on involving fathers. A 2023 peer-reviewed review in Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review found that over two-thirds of school programs lack specific strategies to engage fathers. This is true not only for under-resourced schools, but for programs everywhere. This matters because father engagement does not fail due to fathers being absent or uninterested. It fails because schools were not set up to recruit, train, or support fathers from the start. Family engagement in schools was built around mothers’ availability and communication styles. When fathers participate, they enter a system that was not made for them. Schools often see this as a father engagement problem, but it is really a design issue.