ENGAGING PARENTS requires out of the box thinkingOver half of student achievement is due to home and community factors. EPI's team of experts fosters partnerships between schools and parents. We facilitate programming for parents, teachers and administration to help them frame their parent partnerships and measure their success. Our expertise has been sought internationally and our extensive work in this area means we know what works.
Your website is a key channel to inform and engage parents. An EPI website audit can help you design targeted messaging that amplifies your story and serves as an entry point for parent engagement. We help schools define what they want from parents, establish partnerships, communicate effectively and support parents as they support learning. |
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Lisa Riegel and EPI's work in our district allowed for us to connect the "WHY" to the "WHAT" that we are doing and share that in a way that our staff, parents and community understood our message.
Kevin Kimmel, Superintendent, Bucyrus City Schools
"EPI provided us with monthly family engagement activities that we shared with our district customers in a variety of ways. From fun activities that parents could complete with their students to more serious subjects such as executive function, Lisa Riegel's contribution enabled us to stay connected with families, especially during Covid."
Dena Kirby, Mid Ohio ESC
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Check out my book on engaging parentsWe cannot do it alone. We need parents. Schools know this. They try to engage parents. Consider how many nights you have attended feasts or festivals. How many times have you served a spaghetti dinner to your students and their parents? How many times have you set up donuts with dads or muffins with moms? Or, how many hours have you cleaned your classroom and organized your grading during a parent-teacher conference night when attendance is poor and the only people coming are the ones you don’t need to talk to?
What we do DOESN’T work! And, it is exhausting and inefficient. In this book, I am going to help you reframe parent engagement so it does work. I am going to challenge you to step out of the June Cleaver, 1950s antiquated model of parent engagement and embrace your creativity to design engagement that meets the needs of parents in this century. I am going to challenge you to identify and examine your own assumptions and biases about the parents in the community you serve. I am going to push you to clearly define what you want of parents and then to align activities with those purposes. I am going to ask you to think about how you will know you are successful with parents, and I am going to provide a lot of practical, out-of-the-box ideas you can use tomorrow to help engage your parents. By reading this book and using its principles and ideas, you will become a better educator. Your students will be more engaged and will perform better. Parents will sing your praises. You will be happier and less stressed about working with parents. And, you will able to lead your school to become a more welcoming and cooperative space where parents are real partners. |
What does a strong partnership between schools and families look like?
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Schools need parents more than ever as we transition to a new model of education that includes remote and hybrid structures. EPI works with schools to help them effectively engage parents so they can establish strong partnerships that will lead to student success.
Watch this video to see how parents and teachers can work together as a team. |
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What do we mean when we say support learning at home
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As schools went to remote learning, many parents purchased desks as a way to set up learning in their home. While establishing a quiet, academic space in the home is important, supporting learning at home is much more than furniture.
Watch this video for ideas to share with parents about supporting learning at home by structuring a home environment where they focus on the tasks over the time and celebrate progress over the product. |
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How do we communicate with parents?
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Working as a parent-teacher team requires strong communication. Many parents are not sure when or how to reach their child’s teacher. Watch this video for ideas to share with parents.
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How do we help parents keep their kids emotional regulated
School is stressful for many students. When home becomes school, this stress can be exacerbated. Our brain has a predictable biological reaction to stress. Teaching parents how to help their children interrupt the cycle that leads to panic or anxiety can help them take control of this reaction and keep the front of their brain where learning and decision making happens engaged.
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Watch this video as a resource you can use with parents to teach them the way our brains deal with stress.
Watch this video for tips parents can use to teach their children about stress in the brain and stop the stress reaction.
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