The beginning of a new school year is filled with opportunities to connect with families: welcome calls, orientation, registration, classroom introductions, back-to-school nights, transition activities, and the first conversations between educators and caregivers. While these interactions can feel routine, each one is an opportunity to establish trusting relationships and two-way communication: the foundations for a meaningful family-school partnership.

Rather than thinking of family engagement as a scheduled event, schools can approach every interaction as an opportunity to build trust, learn from families, and strengthen partnership.

Family Engagement Is Continuous—and It Changes as Students Grow

Family engagement matters from early childhood through high school and beyond. As students grow, engagement evolves: The roles of families and educators shift, making space for students to take on more responsibility for their own learning. Our new infographic, Continuous Family Engagement: Two-Way Partnerships from Early Learning to High School and Beyond, illustrates this progression. It offers research-based strategies for families and educators across a student’s educational career, from early learning to preparing for life after high school.

As students grow, engagement evolves: The roles of families and educators shift, making space for students to take on more responsibility for their own learning.

At the beginning of the school year, this developmental lens can help educators think more intentionally about the relationships they are establishing. In early childhood, families often lead and guide learning. At this stage, kindergarten transition planning, goal-setting, and consistent two-way communication are particularly important. In elementary school, educators can strengthen relationships by connecting families to literacy, math, attendance, and social and emotional learning strategies they can do at home while creating opportunities for families to advocate and participate in decisions.

In middle school, family engagement changes. Students begin to take more ownership over their learning, and families can support them by communicating expectations, monitoring progress, setting goals, and helping them connect school to their interests and future plans. A meta-analysis of 50 studies found that family involvement during middle school was positively associated with achievement, particularly when parents communicated expectations, discussed learning strategies, and connected education to goals.

By high school, students take greater ownership of decision-making, while families continue to play an important role in monitoring graduation progress, discussing college and career pathways, and supporting self-advocacy and decision-making.

Start With Relationships, Not Requirements

Regardless of grade level, the beginning of the year is an important time to establish how families will experience their relationship with the school. Will their first contacts primarily involve forms, requirements, and information from the school? Or will educators also ask families what they know about their children, what they hope for this year, how they prefer to communicate, and what would help them feel connected? And if educators ask, will they use what they learn to support their students and foster continued relationships with families?

This distinction matters. The Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships emphasizes that effective partnerships require both educators and families to build the knowledge, skills, confidence, and relationships to work together around student success. That means a back-to-school event is not evaluated by attendance alone. Success can also mean that families leave knowing who they can contact, believing that educators value what families know about their students, understanding how they can support learning, and feeling confident that their perspectives will be heard.

These relationship-building opportunities do not need to be elaborate. Simple conversations can create a relational foundation for deeper engagement later: a teacher making a positive phone call before there is a problem, a principal spending time talking with families at arrival, a community school coordinator connecting a caregiver to a needed resource, or an expanded learning partner asking families about their priorities for afterschool programming. It’s important that school leadership sets clear expectations, models two-way partnership with families, provides staff with training and coaching to build their own confidence and skills, and creates the time and space for all staff to engage with families. Without infrastructure to support systemic family engagement, busy educators can deprioritize relationship-building activities that take time.

From Involvement to Partnership

Schools can use the beginning of the year to think about where their family engagement opportunities fall along a broader continuum. Traditional involvement—attending an open house, receiving school communications, volunteering, or participating in an event—can provide important entry points for connection. But schools can intentionally build from those experiences toward deeper partnership: two-way communication, collaborative goal-setting, family advocacy, co-design, and shared decision-making.

Building that progression requires capacity on both sides of the partnership. Educators and leaders need opportunities to develop the mindsets and skills to engage families effectively, just as families need access to information and opportunities that build their capacity to support learning, navigate school systems, advocate for their students and communities, and participate in decisions. This is a central premise of the Dual Capacity-Building Framework: Family engagement efforts should build the capabilities, connections, confidence, and beliefs needed for educators and families to sustain effective partnerships.

Make the First Interaction a Beginning, Not a Standalone Event

Back-to-school season provides a natural entry point to family engagement. But the goal is not simply to start the year with strong family engagement; it is to establish relationships and routines that continue all year long.

As schools welcome students and families this year, consider not only what information families need from you, but what you need to learn from them and how you will use that information in a way that is respectful and not transactional. What opportunities will families have to share their knowledge? How will communication continue after back-to-school night? How will families know that their perspectives matter? And how will engagement evolve as students become increasingly independent?

The beginning of the year offers a chance to set that expectation from the first interaction: Families are not simply welcomed into the school building; they're welcomed into partnership.

Families are not simply welcomed into the school building; they're welcomed into partnership.

Explore Education Northwest Resources

School teams can use the Continuous Family Engagement infographic as a starting point for conversations about how family engagement changes from early childhood through high school and beyond. The infographic includes strategies for both families and educators related to academics and attendance, social and emotional learning, relationships and connectedness, and shared power and decision-making.

Schools can also explore learning modules and a self-assessment to examine current family engagement practices, build staff capacity, and identify opportunities to strengthen family-school partnerships. Although Education Northwest developed these materials for the Washington Statewide Family Engagement Center, the resources still apply to other states given the research that informed their development.

For an early-learning perspective, the blog post Beyond Open House: Redefining Family Engagement in Early Learning considers how schools can move beyond event-based engagement toward sustained relationships with families.

Ashley Sheppard is a principal consultant with extensive experience in family engagement and community schools. Before joining Education Northwest, Ashley developed and sustained school-family-community partnerships as a connected schools manager in Washington, D.C. She is passionate about supporting school leaders to create the conditions for authentic and effective partnerships between educators and families.