CTHSS Leaders for Partnerships designed Mini Visits to provide a common structure and regular schedule for school-based Family Engagement Teams to meet with district leaders. Our Time to Shine made sure that district meetings were well planned and worthwhile with time for teams to discuss challenges and celebrate important milestones and accomplishments.
Middletown, Connecticut
Mini Visits
The Connecticut Technical High School System is a district with 17 schools located throughout the state. Each school draws students from many towns in its region. District Leaders for Partnerships designed Mini Visits to provide a common structure and regular schedule for school-based Family Engagement Teams to meet with district leaders to discuss their plans and their progress on family and community engagement linked to school improvement goals for student success.
At the Mini Visits, each partnership team sets its agenda to report progress and to discuss pressing needs. The meetings are scheduled at the end of the school day to ensure that team members have enough time to discuss successful activities, emerging challenges, and to ask questions of the CTHSS Leaders for Partnerships. District leaders share ideas from other schools that faced similar challenges, hear team members’ views, and outline available resources that may assist the school-based team. The Mini Visits demonstrate that the District Leaders for Partnerships are seriously interested in the unique conditions at each school, and provide each Family Engagement Teams with personal attention and time to share ideas and plan improvement for future programs.
Our Time to Shine—CTHSS Regional Meeting
Time is always tight for the busy schools in the Connecticut Technical High School System (CTHSS). District Leaders for Partnerships continually explore new ways to make the most of the time they spend with each school (see Mini Visits, above) and how they organize time for district-led workshops where all schools convene to discuss their programs of family and community engagement. The leaders know that their teams are particularly interested in practical, useful, and tested practices that will help them improve their own school’s partnership program.
Chairs and co-chairs want their partnership teams to use resources effectively—e.g., time, money, people, and skills. They want to plan and conduct practices of family and community engagement that will help their high school students meet goals for academic and behavioral success each year, and to graduate from high school on-time. Teams always enjoy time to share their best practices with each other and to discuss challenges and find solutions to engage more families in useful ways.
The geographic distance between the district office and all schools means that meetings must be well planned and worthwhile. Our Time to Shine fulfilled these criteria with time for teams to discuss challenges and celebrate important milestones and accomplishments.
Our Time to Shine is featured in Promising Partnership Practices 2015.
