The parents of middle school students on our team raised the concern that getting parents engaged at the middle school level is a challenge. Historically, this has been true. We wanted our innovation to engage parents and create a memorable experience for them and their middle schoolers in a way that was novel and set a welcoming tone for the year.
We involved students in the planning for the revamped Open House. With their help, the result was a Street Fair that featured festive string lights, catering from a local restaurant, Kona ice and small community businesses. Teams of teachers traveled with their students and interacted with the parents. Parents connected with peers and students met others in their grade.
We had begun the middle school year with a team building challenge for staff and some of these activities were built into the Street Fair. Some parents were apprehensive at first but the teachers encouraged and involved them.
Feedback told us that parents and students liked seeing their teachers in a different light. Sometimes it’s these “invisible barriers” that limit us from knowing one another. Another metric was reaching some families that typically don’t attend, representing new engagement. The Street Fair had balanced representation across our three large geographic areas, another measure of success.
A mindset shift is one way to represent “spread." Family and school engagement is always on our mind as we think about how to make things better. Our ideas don’t always succeed but it’s not just success that is instructive. The revamped Open House helped us to know what can work. We don’t plan on doing a traditional Open House again anytime soon.
We see great value in these efforts, particularly as they apply to a challenging age group. To that end, we are taking our experience "on the road" to exchange ideas about how to engage middle school families. One idea is to present at the Pennsylvania Association of Middle Level Education state conference, where we can encourage other schools to try these ideas. More immediately, we are presenting at a smaller upcoming conference.
You need a good group of people to work together and go up against the obstacles, together. It’s also valuable to have a wide range of backgrounds on the team to best hear a variety of perspectives and to gain buy-in. In our case it was students and parents with students in middle school grade levels that helped widen our lens. The team is definitely part of the “secret sauce.”
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