Engaging and Re-engaging Families When a Student is Not Doing Well

Winter, 2012 Journal/News from the UCLA Center

Most efforts to involve parents with their child’s school seem aimed at those who want and are able to come to the school. It's important to have activities for such parents. It's also important to remember that, at most schools, these represent a small percent of families.

How can schools address the rest? Especially those whose children are doing poorly at school. Ironically, efforts to involve families whose youngsters are doing poorly often result in parents becoming less involved. For example, a parent of such a youngster typically is called to school to explore the child's problems and leaves with a sense of frustration, anger, and guilt. It is not surprising, then, that the parent subsequently avoids school contact as much as feasible. If schools really want to involve such families, they must outreach and offer a wide range of positive supports and interactions.

Start by Understanding Barriers to Home Involvement

Analyses of the problem of enhancing home involvement underscore a host of barriers. Our analysis leads us to group them as follows:

Types – institutional, personal, and impersonal Forms – negative attitudes, lack of mechanisms/skills, and

Institutional barriers. These stem from deficiencies related to resource availability (money, space, time) and administrative use of what is available to involve families. Deficient use of resources includes failure to establish and maintain formal home involvement mechanisms. It also encompasses general lack of interest or hostile attitudes toward home involvement among school staff. Instances of deficient use of resources occur when there is no policy commitment to facilitating home involvement, when inadequate provisions are made for interacting with family members who don't speak English, or when no resources are devoted to upgrading the skills of staff with respect to home involvement.

Personal barriers. Some school personnel and some family members lack requisite skills or find participation uncomfortable. Others may lack...

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