School District continues effort to get parents involved in students’ education
The School District of Lee County is continuing its quest to more engage students’ parents in their pupils’ education.
Chief Strategy Officer Dr. Jennifer Cupid-McCoy said Superintendent Dr. Denise Carlin charged her cabinet with addressing district priorities with an emphasis on urgency in terms of the district getting better with the work they do. Out of this, a task force was established to gather community input in regards to family engagement and empowerment.
“Family engagement and empowerment is captured by annual surveys,” Cupid-McCoy said.
Those surveys, though, are not reaching a lot of parents – the district got 4,197 responses last fall, out of 89,000.
“That is a very small percentage,” she said. The goal of our task force – how do we incrementally and systematically increase the number. When you have a task force that is comprised of community members and educators, it is important that we have a disciplined approach to the work that we are attempting to accomplish. As a result of that, we worked through what we referred to as theory of action, guided the work of the task force.”
The task force identified three main barriers – time, language and communication, and technology or related access.
Cupid-McCoy said the potential solution for the time challenge is using shorter surveys with multiple choice answers that have a clear subject line that states the estimated time, topic, and purpose. Other potential solutions include sending the survey at strategic times of the day and reducing and controlling the number of surveys sent annually.
As far as language, a potential solution is partnering with community organizations to increase awareness about surveys and encourage participation, as well as encouraging family participation through student and school-based incentives and using timely reminder notification to reach families.
Cupid-McCoy said for technology the proposed solution is increased accessibility – availability through passing out paper surveys at the car loop, or schoolwide events, as well as multiple languages and formats.
“When we work together, work collaboratively with external partners, we are able to do so much more than if we attempt to do this on our own,” she said.
Carlin said she board members share the same sentiment – family engagement is extremely important.
“We know that parent engagement is huge in the success of our students. I think that is important for the community and this board to remember that at the end of the day it is about our students – parent engagement is a huge part of that process,” Board member Melisa Giovannelli said.
Cupid-McCoy said the task force will submit their final recommendations in July/August. A robust online engagement and empowerment resource hub will be developed in October/November 2025.