Community Engagement Vision into Action

Having a community engagement plan for your district is an important part of the process for improving outcomes for students and families. Turning your district’s or charter school’s vision into action is also paramount. This section will focus on understanding and committing to creating the necessary conditions to maintain authentic, ongoing community engagement efforts. That often means building upon your district’s current community engagement activities while also establishing a clear plan for community engagement accountability.

Setting the Conditions for Authentic, Ongoing Community Engagement

Meaningful and ongoing community engagement will be rooted in the following conditions:

Strengths: Staying committed to this important work will include reflection, acknowledgement, and celebration for what is going well. Both the core community engagement team and the students and families will benefit from identifying and building upon your district’s strengths in community engagement work. Consider including regular reviews of your district’s plan to identify what the district is doing that is having a direct, positive effect on engaging students and families.

Accountability: Written plans and review processes improve and enable accountability. This means that best practice dictates that each district should determine who will be responsible completing a Community Engagement Planning Template or equivalent written plan. That person should also be responsible for implementing that plan and adjusting or revising it as needed. Your core community engagement team will be the essential group to move this work forward and help each district’s administration meet their community engagement expectations and aspirations.

Iterations: All effective school improvement work relies upon continuous quality improvement cycles. Community engagement is not a “one and done” district plan or a list item which can be checked off without thoughtful and meaningful review and input. Instead, in order to continually improve, districts will need to regularly review their plans, assess the effectiveness of those plans, and make adjustments to the plans which will result in many iterations (revised versions) of the original plans. This does not negate the original community engagement efforts, but holds space for improvement to better meet the needs of students and families as districts learn more about how to do so. Community engagement planning iterations are evidence of the commitment your district has to this important work.

**Sharing Plans and Inviting Input**
A final key condition for authentic community engagement planning involves clear communication to share the district’s plans as well as the invitation to get student, family, and the community’s input on those plans. The iterations referred to in the prior paragraph should include ongoing feedback from the populations being served. The focal groups will need opportunities to learn about and contribute to the community engagement plans in the district. The planning efforts will need to address how community partnerships will be rooted in care and reciprocity (described in Module 3).

Reflection Activity

As you read about the necessary conditions to maintain authentic, ongoing community engagement, what else came to mind? Consider having all core community engagement team members reflect on that question and then share with each other the additional considerations you each identified. Take the discussion further by describing how your district or charter school can set those conditions and how they might be embedded into your community engagement plan.

Let’s continue exploring how to stay committed to ongoing community engagement in section 4.3.

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Go to the Next Section: 4.3