School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Caring for the Children We Share
Joyce Epstein, 2002

Roles in the partnership
This chapter provides the theory, framework and guidelines from research carried out in the US to help schools develop successful partnerships with parents and their communities. Partnerships in themselves do not produce successful students but need to be designed to engage, guide and motivate students to produce their own success.

Students are crucial as they are parents' main source of information about the school; teachers can help students better perform this role. The aim is to produce more family-like schools that recognise each child's individuality and welcomes all families, not just those that are easy to reach. In a partnership, parents create more school-like families recognising that each child is also a student, reinforcing the importance of school, homework and activities that build student skills and feelings of success.

Communities create school-like opportunities and events to reinforce and reward students for good progress, creativity and excellence. Community-minded families and students help their neighbourhoods and other families. The concept of the community school is changing.

Being positive about students
Results from a number of research studies show that schools in more economically depressed communities make more contact with families about the problems and difficulties their children are having, unless they work to develop partnership programmes that include positive communication with parents about their children's accomplishments.

Researchers conclude that just about all families care about their children, want them to succeed and are eager to obtain better information from schools and their communities so they can better support their children's education. Equally, teachers would like to involve families but many do not know how to go about setting up positive programmes, and are consequently fearful about doing so. Just about all students want their families to be more knowledgeable partners in their schooling but need help in how to talk to their families about school decisions, activities and homework.

The view is that caring communities can be built intentionally; they include families that might not become involved on their own; and that by their own reports, all parties believe that partnerships are important for helping students succeed across the grades.

Six types of involvement in partnership
Based on her work, Epstein identified a framework of six major types of involvement: Parenting; Communicating; Volunteering; Learning at Home; Decision Making; and Collaborating with the Community.

She raises a number of questions that schools should ask, with their partners, including: What partnerships are currently working well? Which families are we now reaching, and which ones are we not reaching? How might family and community connections assist the school in helping more students reach higher goals and achieve greater success?

Schools make choices in what they choose to do in partnership, but when schools, parents and communities see each other as partners, a caring community forms around students and starts to work.

Link:
For information on the National Network of Partnership Schools (in the US), which is informed by this research, visit www.csos.jhu.edu/P2000/

Epstein, J. (2002). School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Caring for the Children We Share. In School, Family and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, Thousand Oakes, CA: Corwin Press.