Toolkit of Resources for Engaging Parents and Community as Partners in Education. Part 2: Building a Cultural Bridge

The Toolkit of Resources for Engaging Parents and Community as Partners in Educationis designed to guide school staff in strengthening partnerships with families and community members to support student learning. The Regional Education Laboratory for the Pacific (REL Pacific) developed the toolkit in response to a request from the Guam Alliance for Family and Community Engagement in Education, whose members include K-12 school staff and college faculty who work with K-12 schools. This toolkit offers an integrated approach to familyand community engagement, bringing together research, promising practices, and a wide range of useful tools and resources with explanations and directions for using them. In this Toolkit, we define family and community engagement as an overarching approach for building relationships with families that support family well-being, strong parent-child relationships, and ongoing learning and development of children. This definition encompasses other existing definitions (e.g., No Child Left Behind Act, 2001) and emphasizes the importance of school staff working as partners with families to support students in multiple ways.