Panel discussion on Family and Community Partnerships
This session explored the role of families and communities in sustaining high-impact tutoring. Brittany Miller (Managing Director, Outcomes-Based Contracting, Southern Education Foundation) moderated a conversation between Jennifer Cisneros (Director of Expanded Learning Programs, Santa Ana Unified School District), Alejandro Gibes de Gac (Chief Executive Officer, Springboard Collaborative and Paloma), and Michelle Vilchez (Chief Executive Officer, Innovate Public Schools) that discussed systemic barriers families face in accessing high-impact tutoring for their children, authentic approaches to family engagement and advocacy, and how schools can more effectively partner with families in providing high-impact tutoring.
Key takeaways included:
The Importance of Family and Community Partnerships
- Sustaining high-impact tutoring for the long run relies heavily on partnerships with families and the community.
- Parents and caregivers are essential to their child’s success, though many parents, especially Black, Brown and low-income parents, are not always viewed this way by schools.
Authentic Approaches to Engagement & Advocacy
- Panelists highlighted how families can be part of high-impact tutoring in different ways: serving as tutors themselves; supporting and encouraging their child’s attendance and participation in high-impact tutoring programs at the school-level; and advocating for resources to start or expand high-impact tutoring in their communities.
- Despite systemic barriers families face in accessing high-impact tutoring for their children, families have demonstrated their power through successful advocacy and mobilization efforts to bring high-impact tutoring to various communities.
Innovative Partnerships and Tools
- Leveraging community resources and older generations, such as grandparents, can be valuable assets in tutoring and advocacy efforts.
- Tutoring costs, driven by labor, require creative solutions as funding sources, like ESSER, sunset. Engaging parents as tutors alongside AI innovations in content creation may be a cost-effective approach.
- NSSA and Innovate Public Schools shared their newly launched Family and Caregiver Toolkit in English and Spanish to support parents in better understanding what high-impact tutoring means and advocating for their child's educational needs.
Optimism and Future Directions
- Participants expressed optimism about the potential for the ESSER sunset to push the field toward more innovative and effective use of resources in addition to more strongly engaging families and communities in partnerships and advocacy for high-impact tutoring.