Chapter 8: Centering the Epistemologies of Black People in Family-Schooluniversity Partnerships to Support Students

Family, school, and community-school partnerships successfully create more equitable and humanizing schools for Black children and youth. The teams in this partnership are made up of families, community members, scholars, and activists. Team members merge their resources with one goal: student success. We drew upon the epistemologies of Black students, families, and communities in this project to disrupt White supremacy, structural racism, and anti-Blackness in school partnerships and in schools. Our project, now in its third year, sought to disrupt the status quo by situating Black people as the leaders and decision makers in schools. To this end, we partnered with school personnel and community members to inform, design, implement, and assess more equitable family-school-community partnerships.