Ms. Brown,” I said, “I’m Dr. Harris, chief engagement officer from Richmond Public Schools. We wanted to tell you how great your daughter is doing. We love seeing her at school.”
Ms. Brown (a pseudonym) seemed surprised to see me knocking on her door for a home visit. Her eyes darted from me to Marquis, the family liaison. The corners of her mouth turned upward, but she had questions in her eyes.
“So, you’re just coming by here to say she’s good?” Her head tilted to the side.
Marquis shifted his notebook to his left hand, extending his right hand toward Ms. Brown. She examined his hand for a moment before taking his offering.
“Yeah,” I said. “We love her and wanted you to know she’s gotten more learning time in since she’s been making it to school more often. Thank you. Is there anything else we can support you with?”
A long exhale filled the space between us as Ms. Brown’s shoulders relaxed. “OK.” She smiled. “That’s good to hear. Whew. I didn’t know what to expect.”
When I visit families like the Browns, I am reminded of bell hooks’ definition of love as an action. I agree that loving well is “the task in all meaningful relationships” (hooks, 2000). As Richmond Public Schools’ (RPS) first-ever chief engagement officer, my role supported the district in building meaningful relationships with families and the community to reach district goals. I aimed to create a system of learning that loves the students, families, and communities of Richmond well.
Why Traditional Methods Fail
In the 2021–22 school year, chronic absenteeism, which RPS defines as being absent 10 percent or more of the school year, soared as high as 37 percent across all student populations. Attendance officers monitored families when students missed school and told families when and how to show up. This one-sided relationship failed to lower chronic absenteeism.
This traditional approach to absenteeism was punitive. It assumed that students missed school because their families didn’t value education, when the truth was, in communities like Richmond’s historic Jackson Ward neighborhood, barriers persisted for families that prevented students from coming to school.
Laden with assumptions about what families believed and needed, this punitive way of thinking failed to acknowledge families’ humanity, strengths, and challenges. By not creating space to understand families’ experiences, the system alienated them, isolating absenteeism from learning and family contexts. After spending time with families to understand their actual needs, I realized that the solution to chronic absenteeism could neither decouple students from their families nor families from their communities and contexts. We needed to see families.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Richmond Public Schools
A family liaison shares breakfast snacks and words of encouragement with students getting off the bus at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School.
A Relationship Issue
As a former principal, I believe that students not coming to school isn’t an attendance issue; it’s a relationship issue.
As sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot writes, “Parents enter the school building not just as individuals but as representatives of families, their histories and aspirations woven into the tapestry of their children’s lives” (2003, p. 11). These histories include uncomfortable experiences of not being seen or valued, and if the district doesn’t take that into account, it will be difficult to build trust. Parents are balancing the world: raising their children, making a living, and advocating for a better future. It’s a lot. Families will not take part in spaces they feel don’t value them.
A relationship based on trust makes love possible. As a district, RPS committed itself to showing families that we value them by teaching with love, leading with love, and serving with love as its priorities. From these district priorities, I developed the We Love You Here campaign in 2022 as an initiative of the Office of Engagement. The We Love You Here campaign was an intentional departure from transacting with families, where attendance was the commodity. Our families needed to know we loved them. Through activities that shifted RPS’ attention from attendance to making families feel seen, heard, and loved, we showed we deserved their trust.
As family engagement went up, chronic absenteeism in Richmond went down. Between the 2021–22 and 2023–24 school years, chronic absenteeism fell from 37 percent to 18.6 percent for all students, a decrease of nearly 20 percent. Some individual schools experienced a 50 percent reduction in chronic absenteeism by prioritizing family engagement.
Here are some steps we took.
Looking at the Problem from a Systems Approach
Systems either create or impede capacity. To understand our obstacles and capacity, RPS hosted over 150 meetings in Richmond as part of a districtwide strategic planning process. The meetings included RPS leadership, community partners, and families. Engagement emerged as a clear districtwide priority from these conversations with the community and families.
While relationships with families had always been a priority, family engagement was considered a stand-alone activity. Each school and classroom used tactics like back-to-school nights and parent potlucks. These activities, while important, did not invite families into a relationship with RPS. They told families how to engage with the district rather than listening to families about how they wanted to be engaged. We had to shift family engagement from an isolated potluck into an essential strategy that fostered student achievement and two-way communication with families—on their terms.
In the Office of Engagement, we tracked the implementation of engagement strategies at the school and district levels and created division-wide engagement toolkits that provided leaders clear expectations and examples of how to build trust with families. This initiative gave families a seat at the table. The office also signaled to the district and the community that families and communities were important in Richmond.
As home visits increased, we saw chronic absenteeism decrease across the district.
Prioritizing Relationships
Traditionally, educators have considered family engagement to be an additional task outside their essential work. That narrative, however, had to shift for the district. The Office of Engagement created a professional learning experience for educators that spoke to Anne Henderson’s five dimensions of effective family engagement: (1) engagement is linked to learning; (2) engagement requires the building of authentic relationships; (3) engagement affirms differences so that families feel seen, heard, and loved; (4) engagement supports families’ advocating for their children; and (5) engagement shares powers such that parents are equal partners (Henderson, 2007).
Our office provided professional development that helped our educators develop empathy for families and recognize their contributions to their child’s education. Teachers increased their direct outreach and interaction with families. Our educators began holding space to listen to families, so parents felt they had a seat at the table. Our goal was to convert their feedback into action.
One critical change we made was to create new family liaison roles to replace attendance officers. The family liaison is a point of contact for families, and the role’s goal is to help remove barriers to student attendance. We divided our 22 family liaisons into neighborhoods so they could develop a deep understanding of communities—the places of worship, the community leaders, and any persistent barriers. Family liaisons walk their assigned neighborhoods regularly during community walks, becoming visible to residents and greeting students on their way to school.
The family liaisons also conduct morning home visits with all our families in Richmond, with additional in-person supports for some families when needed. During these visits, family liaisons listen to stories about the families’ lives and share positive affirmations about the families’ children. They don’t discuss attendance. Instead, they ask how we can help. As bell hooks explains, “We cannot know love if we cannot surrender our attachment to power” (2000, p. 135). Spending time with families inside their homes shifts power to families on their terms and creates a relational demand for the district to act on what it hears.
We also realized there was an opportunity to build meaningful, trusting relationships with families even at the most punitive level—the truancy hearing. We partnered with the Richmond Juvenile Court system to move petition hearings out of the courtroom and into a local middle school. The judge now asks families to talk to various community partners located around the room, each one providing potential services that could address family needs and offer areas of support. Families are given a specific amount of time after working with a partner to improve attendance. Once families show improvement in attendance, the court drops the petition.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Richmond Public Schools
Barack Obama Elementary School Teacher of the Year Sharese Williams and one of her students share a joyful hug.
Quantifying Outreach
Teaching and learning are inseparable from attendance. However, it is impossible to understand the impact of family engagement without looking at data in the context of relationships with families. I worked with my team to create an engagement dashboard, which tracked not only our outreach to families but also feedback from them about how to improve their educational experience. Using the engagement dashboard, my team could clearly see how increased engagement correlated with stronger attendance and relationships with our families. For example, as home visits increased, we saw chronic absenteeism decrease across the district. This shifted engagement out of a silo; we could now identify and share our best strategies across RPS. Ultimately, the engagement dashboard pushed us to quantify engagement, analyze impactful practices, and draw stronger correlations between engagement and positive attendance.
Most importantly, the dashboard, accessible to both district and school-based staff, facilitated stronger internal communication and enabled school and district stakeholders to reallocate resources in response to families’ needs. For example, during home visits, my team spoke with families about their needs, hopes, and desires. As we tracked this data across the district, we saw that housing was a real need for families. The Office of Engagement moved to create community partnerships that could provide direct financial assistance to families.
Quantifying engagement also meant changing how we measured absenteeism. Before the creation of the Office of Engagement, absenteeism was measured by the number of unexcused absences. However, whether or not the absence is excused, students who miss school are still missing instruction; missed instruction impacts achievement. I asked district leaders to reconsider how we measured absenteeism so we could get a fuller picture of how students were doing. Looking at the issue as instruction missed, rather than just unexcused absence, created a fuller picture of the learning environment and allowed us to understand with greater nuance the support families and students needed.
Students not coming to school isn’t an attendance issue; it’s a relationship issue.
Honoring Personal and Community History
As a former principal and the daughter of a community organizer, I learned years ago the importance of honoring a community’s history and its present realities. As each child enters the classroom with unique stories and needs, so does each family and community. When I came to Richmond, I sought to understand the beauty, resistance, and triumph of the communities where my students and families grew up. I spent my first year as the chief engagement officer asking questions and listening. Family members shared their hopes and dreams for themselves, their children, and RPS. They expressed a desire to see their children make an impact, drive change in Richmond, and inspire others from their community. Our conversations took place in living rooms, during engagement events, or any space that provided opportunity for connection.
Richmond has a complex relationship with the Black community. Richmond’s Jackson Ward community is known as the Harlem of the South and thrives as an entertainment and economic hub for the Black community. Yet Richmond’s history includes being the former capital of the Confederacy, and many of its residents reacted violently to school desegregation.
Richmond’s complex history meant that many parents rightfully did not trust us. We had to own our history by openly acknowledging the harm families experienced in the past and their concerns when interacting with families and the school staff now. The Office of Engagement needed a message that parents and community members could rally behind. The We Love You Here campaign was born from the realization that parents needed to feel love from the district. Through social media, our website, and a family newsletter, we leveraged visual storytelling to share families’ and community members’ experiences. In addition, the district expanded its communications team to create space for families to tell their own stories. These stories helped us repair the harm that was done and let the community know we prioritized them.
The first step in redressing harm is to recognize it. It isn’t easy to honor history, but understanding the past and present harm experienced by families begins the journey toward healing. We separate ourselves from families when we do not invest time and heart into knowing their truth, including their tears and outrage. By knowing what shapes families—where they have come from and where they want to go—we can create a personalized engagement system based on the needs and the beautiful strengths of the school community. We can build a foundation to repair past injustices and communicate respect and love so families know they are valued.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Richmond Public Schools
RPS family liaisons visit residents during a Community Walk, a neighborhood engagement event aimed at building strong relationships and trust between families and schools.
Giving Families a Voice
An effective engagement system shows love for people. Love grounds my actions with families. This act is the essence of my work as an educator and an engagement leader. This love includes students, families, and staff, because the people doing the work need love, too.
Absenteeism is a national crisis. Without our families, we cannot address this issue. Our actions must align with our values, honor the community’s needs and wisdom, and build relationships grounded in trust. As bell hooks said, “True love does have the power to redeem, but only if we are ready for redemption” (2000, p. 107). Our responsibility is to be the love that creates a community that sees and welcomes families.
Reflect & Discuss
➛ Which of the strategies for engaging families mentioned here would work best for your school or district?
➛ How does your school show families they matter?
