Chapter 1: Introduction to Promising Practices for Family and Community Involvement During High School

This volume focuses on family and community connections with education during the high school years. In this introductory chapter I first enumerate the reasons that the volume is needed. I then describe how the volume is structured, and finish by highlighting the contributions of each chapter to the overall work.

First, the topic of family, school, and community connections has been relatively neglected as it pertains to high schools by both practitioners and policy makers. In comparison to the wealth of attention that has been focused on involving parents with schools during the early childhood and elementary school years, less attention has been directed to parents of high school students. The development of educational programs to forge connections between family, community, students, and educators at the high school level has lagged far behind programs developed for younger children. Similarly, policymakers have acted more often to encourage and increase family and community involvement with schools when children are young than when they are adolescents. Researchers have described the influences of families and communities on high school students but have studied practices or programs that connect students, families, communities, and schools less often and for a shorter time than they have studied practices in the lower grades, probably because, as noted, practices to involve families are more prevalent during early childhood and the elementary grades.