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Federal grant will help support engagement in Colorado schools

Parent involvement is a strong indicator of student success
classroom blocks
Classroom stock photo / Element5 Digital via Unsplash

A major federal grant is meant to help Colorado increase family engagement, and therefore student success, in schools.

Colorado was one of eight grant recipients for a statewide family engagement centers program in August. The state will get $4.8 million over the next five years to implement and enhance family engagement.

While the St. Vrain Valley School District is not directly involved with the grant, their partner, the Colorado Education Initiative, will be one of five organizations administering the grant, and the project is meant to enhance family engagement for all students in Colorado. The National Center for Families Learning is the primary lead for the grant, which will be partnering with the Colorado Education Initiative, Colorado Department of Education, Black Parent Network and the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition.

“Each of us individually and collectively shares responsibility for administering this grant in ways that are good for families and students in Colorado and meet the objectives of the grant,” explained Samantha Olson, vice president of strategy for the Colorado Education Initiative.

The grant will also expand the existing family engagement work at five Colorado school districts, Alamosa School District, Denver Public Schools, Greeley-Evans District 6, Mesa County Valley District 51 and Pueblo City Schools. Those districts were chosen because of their existing work and strengths in family engagement, Olson said.

The project can be understood in three tiers, from a local to regional to state level. At these five specific districts, the grant will help to build upon family engagement efforts and increase capacity to reach a variety of goals, whether that’s targeting a specific age group for parent engagement or helping families to understand how to advocate for themselves through school board governance.

The grant will also support high quality training and technical assistance through regional hubs, which is how other districts besides these five will benefit. While the locations of the hubs have yet to be determined, the plan is to have them in diverse parts of the state geographically while simultaneously serving diverse populations.

“The resources, the learning and promising practices from these districts will be part of what is supported and promoted through the regional training hubs so that other districts or other organizations that support family engagement can benefit from those learnings and training in serving their communities,” Olson said.

At the largest level, the grant will create a statewide advisory committee made up of at least 51% families and parents to advocate for state level policy. The intersection of these three levels is meant to create a feedback loop starting at the local level all the way up to these state policies that might be inhibiting or enabling family engagement and student success.

“How do we bolster that so that the state can be part of promoting and providing support for those practices?” Olson said. “And similarly, the state can have feedback on areas for continuous improvement and growth from the point of view of families in the state.”

Centered in all of this will be a focus on understanding and responding to the lingering impacts of the pandemic. That starts with collecting new data on what students and families need almost three years after the pandemic began.

Olson emphasized that strong family engagement and partnership has been shown through a strong body of research to be a key predictor of student achievement and engagement, which is why this project and this grant are so important.

“(CEI) talks a lot about open systems versus closed systems — the degree to which schools are intended to be open systems that are inviting of and prioritizing family engagement and support in order to model that research around what we know accelerates student achievement,” she said.
The first steps with this grant will be to figure out what supports need to be in place for students and their families and how to best leverage that. Olson added that while the grant will get the ball rolling on increasing family engagement, it is meant to have a much longer impact.

“This center is not intended to be a five year thing,” she said. “It is supposed to be something that exists beyond and leaves capacity for a new normal in terms of family and school engagement post this grant.”