School-Family Collaboration: A Partnership

One of the most important goals that schools can undertake is to develop healthy partnerships with families. A truly collaborative school can be achieved only through active and positive partnerships with families. Our students are all members of families first and students second. Family members are so interrelated that any individual experience that affects one member will affect all. Families are going to have the most lasting and powerful influence on the development of the students with whom we work. Consequently, to be able to lay the groundwork ~or effective collaborative relationships, we must understand families. Traditionally, the image of family was perceived as father, mother, and two or more children living together. Actually, few American families now fit the traditional image (Zinn & Eitzen, 1993). Fewer than one in five families currently fits the more traditional notion of two parents and children. The U.S. Bureau of Census (Scoon-Rogers, 1999) reports that over the past 25 years, the number of families headed by single men has increased from 1.3 million to 3.2 million and families headed by single women has increased from 5.8 million to 13.6 million. One explanation is a divorce rate that has doubled, along with widowing and adoption. Many families consist of step-parents and step-siblings, extended families, common-law families, communal families, serial families, or some combination thereof (Beirne-Smith, Ittenbach, & Patton, 1998). Our notion of the family has to expand to acknowledge the unique pressures of the various types of family units with which teachers will come in contact. The new types of living arrangements often bring unique problems that include everything from blatant discrimination to social stigma (Edwards, 1995). In this article we provide a framework from which to interpret and understand the unique demands being placed on the family. We must understand families and their unique dynamics as a foundation for our efforts toward developing collaborative relationships with the families of the students. Unless we understand families and their unique needs and pressures, attempts at collaboration will be susceptible to misunderstanding. After we have provided this foundational context, we explore real and perceived barriers that can inhibit collaboration among teachers and families. Finally, we provide practical suggestions