As schools navigate the post-pandemic landscape, district leaders face unprecedented challenges that threaten the fabric of school communities. Student behavior is worsening. Teachers are burning out. Relationships between families and schools are deteriorating.
These are all symptoms of the broader societal challenges of isolation and polarization. Technology alone isn’t enough to remedy these ills. Occasional events, like back-to-school nights and episodic family-teacher conferences, won’t be enough, either. As Harvard scholar Karen Mapp aptly put it, school leaders “need guidance in order to parlay those events into real and lasting partnerships with families.”
Solving these serious problems will require something more fundamental than either tech solutions or event planning can provide: people working together to build close-knit school communities. In my conversations with school districts across the country, I’ve observed six common practices that successful educational leaders aiming to build resilient, engaged and happy school communities are implementing.
1. Invite feedback from families
At the outset of the school year, encourage each school to survey parents about their concerns and aspirations for the year ahead. Some schools may send out a short survey from a principal, others from the school counselor or social worker.
Vittoria Jackson, school counselor at Andrew Jackson Academy at Prince George’s County in Maryland, crafts a short survey that asks about parents’ hopes for their children and creates a short pulse check on parents’ needs. Some 85% of parents admitted to struggling with anxiety or depression over financial challenges, which inspired her development of a “parent care” package that includes grocery gift cards, basic toiletries, a gratitude journal, and other small essentials, designed to encourage families. That small gesture began to build real trust between the family and school.
2. Leverage data
Vittoria’s use of her survey findings to reach out to parents and create community exemplifies another strategy: using available data to build better insights on community interactions. While schools and districts have long attempted to measure the impact of their communications (through number of flyers distributed, number of families attending a back-to-school night, and so on), the proliferation of digital communications provides more and deeper insights on this issue.
By leveraging insights like what kinds of communication are engaging families best, how often teachers are translating communication into different languages, and how families are responding to sharing of daily photos and videos, district leaders can zero in on what’s working and use that information to strengthen community-building efforts moving forward.
3. Build shared values
Educators can also build community by centering schools and classrooms around shared values. Choosing important values, like empathy or resilience, gives everyone common ground. This co-created understanding of what matters to the school and in the classroom builds community by providing overarching themes that everyone can agree on, even if conflict occurs in other arenas.
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Teachers can focus on these themes by celebrating when students practice a community value or leading role-play exercises to help students understand how to use the value in daily interactions. Schools might have assemblies around these values or include them in daily or weekly announcements. Both leaders and teachers can use these values as a recurring theme in their communications with families and caregivers.
Los Angeles USD educator Stephanie Fuentes recently told me her class has chosen “kindness” as their classroom value for the year. They started by practicing simple things like using kind words toward one other or not talking over a classmate. Now, students are quick to recognize kindness in action in the classroom and come home proudly recounting how they displayed kindness that day. It’s become a shared language among the class and parents at home.
4. Break down language barriers
One in five school-age children speak a language other than English at home. Overcoming language barriers is critical to embracing the role of the school as a central hub for the community. Communication between teachers and families can be especially tough when they don’t share the same language—it can lead to misunderstanding or further isolation.
But the proliferation of smartphones is making this easier. Teachers are increasingly turning to apps like ClassDojo, for example, to automatically translate messages into the language that matches the phone’s settings. Hundreds of millions of translations across 133 languages are happening weekly, ensuring that families of all languages feel comfortable engaging in their child’s education. Eliminating language gaps allows us to build strong, inclusive classroom communities where everyone feels invited.
5. Meet the needs of families
More districts are embracing their role as a community hub, serving families’ basic needs. For example, Baldwin County Superintendent Noris Price realized that, due to the cost of laundry, parents were keeping kids home from school rather than sending them to class in dirty clothes.
Lakeview Academy, a school in the district, now has a free laundry center for the entire community. This resource has increased attendance and built deeper trust and relationships between the district and families. This collaborative model allows families to develop real relationships with each other and with the school, creating a stronger community based on learning and mutual support.
6. Share classroom moments daily
Meeting in person once a year for parent-teacher conferences is not enough for parents to understand their child’s daily classroom experiences. And while it is important to loop parents into the situation when there is an issue with a student’s academic performance or behavioral conduct, it can be stressful for parents to be invited into the classroom only when things are going wrong. Educators should start an ongoing positive dialogue, where parents regularly see or hear about what their children are doing in class. This allows parents to get a fuller picture—and to celebrate small victories with their children.
The tools available now make this far easier than ever before and help save teachers time in the long run. ClassDojo, for example, is a closed community where families can see and comment on photos and videos posted throughout the week. These videos, photos and community reactions give parents a glimpse into their kids’ lives at school. This kind of closed digital community brings families into the classroom and changes the conversation between families and students from “What did you do at school today?” to “I saw that you built a castle at school today! Tell me about it!”
Parents get the specifics to encourage their students and become part of the educational journey in a meaningful way. Best of all, parents and teachers get to be on the same team: this shifts the mindset from communication to community. In the words of Lizayada Gonzalez, a second-grade teacher: “I encourage the parents to send me pictures and then I share it through this Class Story. The parents give me feedback. They’re like, oh my gosh, you… are so awesome! But I’m really not… I’m just making sure that they’re connected to what we’re doing. That’s how you create community.” Sharing moments invites families to be genuinely part of the magic of the classroom.
District and school leaders have long recognized the impact of engaged and cohesive school communities on student achievement and whole-school improvement. But in the face of chronic absenteeism, sustained learning loss and a student mental health crisis, the urgency has never been more clear. The good news is that district leaders across the country are showing us that building positive, supportive school communities is more than possible. It may also be one of the only ways to address the many challenges facing teachers and education leaders today.
