Director of Family Partnership L. Rochelle Garrett Director of Family Partnership

Putting Families First What guides me to do this work.

Who we are Berea College Great Commitment to serving Appalachian region Partners for Education “All Kentucky Appalachian youth will succeed in school.” Serving student in 33 school districts in 26 counties in an effort to fulfill our mission Like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/partnersforeducation/?fref=ts Family Partnership “Families are engaged and actively support their child’s learning.” Serving 10 counties with intensive services from Family Engagement Specialists and Family Engagement VISTAs Engaging over 5,000 parents/caring adults

Family Partnership Framework

Family Partnership FAST- Evidence Based Program Graduation rates for academic year 2015-2016 Family participation averages Families and Schools Together (FAST)

Cumberland County Middle School FAST FAST is an 8-week intensive evidence based program, which emphasizes 1-1 parent to student talk time. 12 students participated in this FAST cycle at Cumberland County Middle School, which positively impacted school attendance, behavior, grades and parent/teacher communication. See the chart above for impact on attendance from the Cumberland County Middle School FAST program.

Social Capital Activity

Family Partnership Evidence Based Programs Governor’s Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership 28 Fellows graduated from the program, and returned to their districts to exponentially impact student success. Their projects engaged over 500 parents/caregivers.

Family Partnership GCIPL- Evidence Based Program 1. Relationship-building: The school staff builds productive, personal relationships with parents of all students. 2. Communications: Two-way information in many forms flows regularly between school staff and parents about students’ academic achievement and individual needs. 3. Decision-making: School staff encourages, supports, and expects parents to be involved in school improvement decisions and to monitor and assist in school improvement. 4. Advocacy: For each student, the school staff identifies and supports a parent or other adult who can take personal responsibility for understanding and speaking for that child’s learning needs. 5. Learning Opportunities: The school staff ensures that families have multiple opportunities to understand how to support their children’s learning. 6. Community Partnerships: The school staff engages and partners with community members to plan and implement substantive work to improve student achievement.

GCIPL Fellow Project

Family Partnership Additional Effective Programs All Pro Dads Financial Literacy classes and supports Subject specific evening workshops at the school Young parent programs- parenting classes and VROOM- http://www.joinvroom.org/ Grandparents as Parents Foodways classes- gardening, preserving, canning, healthy grilling with dads and male mentors

Family Partnership Challenges Finding appropriate cultural and evidence-based programming for families. Recruiting/transportation in rural areas. Developing trust between schools and parents, so both see the other as partners, forming relationships. Please consider, and share now some of the particular concerns you encounter working with families in poverty. What other challenges do you experience?

What is the impact of effective family engagement? Ask the audience if they can share their ideas of what some positive outcomes of family engagement are. Have a few people share their ideas. You may even do table talk and have a couple of tables share out their top idea. If you wanted you could even introduce this slide by asking participants to “raise your hand if you think parent engagement can make a difference in a child’s education.” Likely everyone will raise their hands. Then say something along the lines of , HOW do you think it makes a difference? Have them discuss for 1-2 minutes at tables and then share out one idea per table of 3-4 ideas. Then you will share the details on the next slide with the “you’re right, and” kind of approach. That will both get the participants actively involved and it will give them a chance to feel validated. Likely they are in the session because they know it is important. GCIPL Class of 2014

For more information, or to answer your questions, please contact L. Rochelle Garrett, Director of the Office of Family Partnership (859) 985-3552 Or Rochelle_Garrett@Berea.edu