Facilitating Conversations with Students on Issues that Impact Them

These guides are helpful for organizations with students ready to lead conversations on various educational topics ↓

• Measuring Up! - Kentucky Student Voice Team: The Kentucky Student Voice Team created assessment discussion guides for students, parents, and school and teacher leaders centered around the culture of assessments from elementary to pre-college years. In these guides, participants are asked to read student quotes and respond to discussion prompts as they reflect on their own experiences in the classroom.
• Building Supportive Schools From the Ground Up - Intercultural Development Research Association: The Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) conducted various listening and learning sessions (June/July 2021) with students, families, and community members in Texas to identify their priorities for relief funding plans at the district level. After conducting these facilitated sessions, IDRA wrote The Building Supportive Schools from the Ground Up report (January 2022) highlighting those priorities. This actionable report covers the importance and basics of COVID-19 federal relief funding, three key community strategies that come out of the community sessions also backed by research, and two plan examples of ESSER funds (Texas and Georgia).

Gathering Stakeholder Priorities for Funding Decisions that Impact Them

These guides are helpful for organizations seeking to understand stakeholder priorities that can inform decisions that impact them directly ↓

• We Demand - Alliance for Quality Education (AQE): The Alliance for Quality Education (AQE) gathered and identified top funding priorities from parents. Based on these priorities, the AQE team developed the We Demand report (June 2021) to capture those common priorities and then created district-specific Now What? fact sheets (October 2021) to support parents in those districts (Albany, Buffalo, Kingston, New York City, Rochester, and Utica) to take actions to advocate for their priorities with district leaders. The one pagers cross-reference parent priorities with district plans, lay out specific actions parents can take, and offer contact information for AQE staff for additional support.
• Learning Through the Pandemic - Teach Plus Mississippi: Teach Plus Mississippi solicited main spending priorities from Teacher Policy Fellows in Mississippi through a survey (July 2020). Mental health supports was identified as the number one priority for educators in the state so Teach Plus MS worked to develop a brief (?) outlining these recommendations that then led to a more detailed advocacy letter (December 2021) for local policymakers going into the budget cycle.

Providing Accessible Information to Caregivers

These guides are helpful for organizations and districts seeking to provide accessible information to caregivers trying to navigate their children’s educational journey ↓

• Future Ready Families - Colorado Education Initiative: Future Ready Families is a landing page for readiness resources—in English and Spanish—to help families get a sense of their child’s current learning level, have critical conversations with their children’s teachers, and learn what their children need to know and should be able to do by the end of each school year.
• Assessment Toolkit - Ready Washington: Ready Washington created a 2021 Fall Assessment Toolkit for districts to respond to caregivers’ communication needs. This toolkit includes messaging and strategies such as sample text messages and social media posts.