Parents as Allies: Innovative Strategies for (Re)imagining Family, School, and Community Partnerships

Research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in rural, urban, and suburban public schools in southwestern Pennsylvania indicated that families and school educators and leaders had different views on education and that more needed to be done to build family, school, and community partnerships. The Parents as Allies Partnership, a collective of community, education, and research institutions, emerged out of this study and has led the co-creation of a human-centered design process with school teams on how to radically reimagine and support family, school, and community collaboration in southwestern Pennsylvania. Through the human-centered design process, teams of families, teachers, staff, and school leaders develop innovative solutions together to address pressing needs they identify in their communities. This article details this community-building process alongside case studies of three schools and how they have used the research to launch deeper and more inclusive and equitable familycentric partnership practices. This study challenges educators, researchers, and parent organizations to think differently about family, school, and community engagement and provides an evidence-based process to apply in their own contexts.