Fostering Family-Educator Collaboration for Parent Power in Salt Lake City

The goal of the Family-School Collaboration Design Research Project, the local FLDC site in Utah, is to design spaces where families have real, collective impact on school-site decision making. The central focus has been on redesigning School Community Councils (SCCs), Utah’s forum for shared governance between families and schools. SCC’s are failing — perhaps designed to fail — in schools serving low-wealth communities of color. Salt Lake City partners put the re-design of SCCs in the hands of those who are best equipped: families and educators themselves.

This ongoing project is a partnership that includes:

• The Community Advocate Network, a group of Latinx families organized around issues of education and wellbeing
• The College of Education at the University of Utah
• The Salt Lake City School District Office of Family-School Collaboration
• University Neighborhood Partners, a department of the University of Utah, dedicated to building resident-led university-community partnerships.

During Phase 1, families and educators developed a set of principles for re-imagining SCCs as equitable, family-centered spaces. In Phase 2 the project expanded to include broader questions of how schools can welcome and value families. Currently, parents are piloting a peer-to-peer outreach effort around SCCs.