Charge to the group:

A redefinition of our work:

Shared understandings:

• To think of community as a singular entity would be a mistake.  The reality is that our district serves a number of communities each of which is unique. If the District truly intends to “engage the community”, it must be prepared to develop a host of strategies to forge and maintain real connections with the many diverse communities it serves.


• Engaging families seemed to emerge as the most important focus for the district in its effort to make productive connections outside the school for the benefit of students.  Engaging business and industry folks, community organizations and others are important, but not as important as engaging families.

 • Our initial conceptualizations of our work seemed to be primarily product or outcome driven -- e.g., “reciprocal partnerships”, “schools as hubs”, “customized education”.  Engagement is a process.  Our primary focus ought to be on process -- i.e., how are we going to engage the communities?  What will it take to engage the communities?   How will we know that we are successfully engaging the community?

• Engagement is on-going; it is not a one time event.  There need to be commitments made at the beginning of the process and opportunities created to assess whether  engagement is producing the hoped-for outcomes.  (Engagement is a process relied on to accomplish some specified purpose(s) or outcome(s).) Engagement requires follow through with agreements made or understandings established.

• Engagement rests on relationships.  Relationships take time to develop; they need to be nurtured over time.  Relationships offer an opportunity to develop trust and a sense of integrity.

• Engaging parents is essential for school staff people.  There used to be an expectation in our district that each building staff would develop a plan for engaging parents -- like the current School Improvement Plan.  Perhaps in future years each building staff could be required to include a section in their School Improvement Plan which would focus their attention on engaging parents.

• Perhaps our committee’s most important contribution to the Schools of the Future project would be to offer ideas -- i.e., coaching -- about what is required to establish productive relationships with our communities. Perhaps we could develop a model which could be used to forge ongoing connections with communities in the future.

Future dates:

December 16:  Next meeting of our committee.

We plan to invite at least one marketing/public relations person to join our meeting as a resource person to help us look at and discuss the community engagement process from a professional’s point of view.

Members are reminded to bring your calendars to the meeting so that we can identify dates for meetings in January, February and March.