- [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club Forums on Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(upbeat music) (bell dings) - Good afternoon, and welcome to The City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

Today's Friday, January 21st.

And I'm Dan Moulthrop, I'm the Chief Executive here.

Over the years at The City Club, we've explored many factors that affect students in their ability to succeed.

Poverty, access to early childhood education, quality childcare to name a few.

Back in November of 2017, one of our guests joining us here today spoke at The City Club to talk about the importance of community supported education and family engagement.

It's been a few years, and now more than never, though, research is showing the importance of family engagement in student success.

So today in our Bernice Carrigan Smith Forum on Education and part of our Education Innovation series, we welcome back Dr. Karen Mapp, Senior Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Because of the current COVID surge, she wasn't able to come to Cleveland and she's joining us remotely from her home.

And joining us here in person at The City Club is Habeebah Grimes, CEO at Positive Education Program, which many of us know as PEP, which works with families and children with severe mental health and behavioral challenges.

And Gina Garrett, Family Program Manager at Open Doors Academy, which provides out a school time programming to students and families across the region and is growing across the state.

Today, we'll hear out- We'll start out, pardon me.

We'll start out hearing from Dr. Mapp about the framework for parent and family engagement she developed at Harvard and with the US Department of Education.

And we'll hear from our panelists about how these ideas actually work in practice, and their importance during these last two years when COVID has really defined how education happens.

As in every City Club Forum, you can participate with your questions.

Please text them to 330-541-5794 if you're joining us via our live radio broadcast or our live stream.

The number again is 330-541-5794.

If you're on Twitter, you can tweet them @TheCityClub and we'll work them into the program.

Members and friends of The City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Gina Garrett, Dr. Karen Mapp, and Habeebah Grimes.

(audience applauds) And Dr. Mapp, as I said, we're going to start with you, so take it away.

- Okay.

Thank you so much.

And I'm so happy to be here, even though it's only virtually.

I'm sure there are some familiar faces in the audience, and hopefully sometime in the near future I'll be able to come back to Cleveland and see you face to face and in person, but in the meantime, I have to be honest with you, I've been doing a lot of teaching and a lot of virtual keynotes.

And so hopefully we won't have any glitches caused by outside forces in terms of the internet.

I've gotten pretty good at the Zoom thing, so hopefully we won't have any problems on my end, but, again, thank you so much for having me.

I'm very honored to be sharing the stage with these folks today, these two fabulous sisters who I had a chance to meet yesterday.

So hopefully, I actually think it's gonna make this a much better presentation, having them share the stage with me to actually bring some of the comments I'm gonna make, make them come alive.

So I'm gonna share my screen, and if I can get a thumbs up that you can see it.

All right.

Fantastic.

So, we talk about how now more than ever family engagement is essential for a student and school success.

And we talked about how I came to Cleveland back in 2017, right?

And talked a little bit about the framework that I had developed with the US Department of Education in 2014.

And over the years, I had done a lot of work to collect data on how people were using the framework, because I'm all about continuous improvement and so I wanted to make sure the framework worked for people, that it was easy to follow, that it was easy to understand, that we really highlighted some of the high quality, high impact practices that people were using.

And that it actually was a research based framework.

So I continued to talk to researchers, talk to practitioners, and in 2019, I came up with version two of the framework, which I worked on.

I always work on these projects with my doctoral students, because I think it's a really good experience for them and also great for them to be cited in work like this.

So the first framework, I worked with one of my students, Paul Kutner, who is now a professor at, I believe he works in Salt Lake City and was working there at one of the universities.

And then with the new framework, it's Eyal Bergman, who is now working for Learning Partners.

And so worked hard on this, put it together, got a lot of great feedback from some of the people, I think, who are even in your audience today.

And so this is what we came up with, and it works more like a logic model now.

It starts with the challenges that we feel are in place that stand the way of partnerships.

It focuses on the essential conditions.

This is what we think needs to change in your practice in order to support effective partnerships.

The policy and program goals are really the outcomes that happen among the adult stakeholders.

What changes do we see?

What capacities do we actually see being built?

And then that then allows us to see some actual differences in outcomes when it comes to our partnerships between educators and families.

They're now working together like a puzzle piece.

And then finally, it's all in support of student and school improvement.

Well, in March of 2020, we had some significant events happen.

First of all, we started with the COVID pandemic, and then later on that spring, the George Floyd murder.

And I call these the two pandemics, and we actually say this in an article that we wrote that I'll talk to you about in a minute.

That the two pandemics, the global COVID-19 crisis and the crisis of systemic racism are really forcing a recalibration of the family-school partnership.

And I really started to think hard about the framework and how did the framework help us as we were trying to make navigate these two pandemics.

And I got a lot of phone calls in 2020.

I got a lot of emails from people saying, "Dr. Mapp, I know you us changed the Dual Capacity-Building framework in 2019.

Do you feel that you need to change it again to meet the moment that we're in?"

And I thought about it, and I was actually having a conversation with my good friend and colleague, Qwasie Rawlings.

And I said, "You know, Qwasie, it's the other way around.

The moment is actually meeting the framework because, quite frankly, people have resisted what was articulated in the framework."

Both the first version and the second version.

They resisted the call to change practice around family engagement.

They resisted the process and organizational conditions, the process conditions, which I'll go over briefly in a few minutes, which talk about what changes we need to make in practice, particularly in the way that we build relationships with families.

So I do think that what happened is that people were opened up to the framework as a result of the two pandemics.

People started to really see that they had to change their practice around, engaging with families and communities, because there was no education happening in 2020 without our families.

Most of the schools, not only here in the United States, but around the world closed.

And so the only way we were able to continue educating our children was in a partnership with our families.

And so I started to listen to people who were doing this work well, and there were some themes that actually emerged out of our response to the two pandemics.

And we really started to see what many of us in this field have been talking about for decades.

And that is that relationships matter.

The institutions, the districts, the schools, the programs that had already developed and had focused on and knew how important it was and were intentional about building relationships of trust between home, school, and community found it much easier to pivot than schools and districts and programs that had not prioritized partnerships before the two pandemics.

And I was hearing stories of smoother transitions.

People were saying that they were not experiencing the kind of low attendance when it came to participating with virtual classrooms, people were saying that their attendance rates were still high.

They also experienced less than expected learning loss during that time period.

And I'm also hearing stories about how these are districts and schools that haven't experienced a kind of tension and conflict around the various responses that we've had to make to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the other things that I've been hearing, particularly from educators, is that they now realize that our families know more, understand more, and do more around teaching and learning than we gave them credit for before particularly the COVID 19 pandemic.

And I'm also hearing now a lot of recognition that we need to do a much better job of supporting our educators through professional development, and also changing our systems and structures to really help them with this practice around family engagement.

And so... Let's see.

There we go.

This is a comment that heard from, and I actually read- I actually heard Nicky Barnes talk about this, but we're hearing a lot about this new normal around family engagement.

And so she said, and I quote, "This past year, our families have become more than partners in our schools.

They have become co-authors."

And many of you who know me well know I talk about this a lot, how we have to be thinking of our families as co-partners, co-planners, co-designers.

"Of our educational journey."

So Nikki says, "This is the new normal for our schools, and I am sure for so many others around the country."

And so I really started to think about this concept of the new normal.

And I did a lot of thinking during this time period about how can I make my work more impactful?

What can I be saying about family engagement and community partnerships that may be more upfront and use language that maybe I've even been avoiding, because I didn't want to ruffle feathers or get people to turn away from the work?

So I said, "Now's the time to go for it."

And I worked with Eyal Bergman, got asked by the Carnegie Foundation to put together this piece called "Embracing a New Normal: Toward a More Liberatory Approach to Family Engagement".

And I have to tell you, even Carnegie editors said to me, "Well, you know, do you really wanna use that word, liberatory?"

What does that mean?"

I said, "That's exactly what I want to use."

And I want people to look it up if they don't know what it means, because it's the kind of practice that we need."

And so liberatory really means free of dominance, free of the hierarchies and the different cast systems that we have developed that stand in the way of partnerships with our families.

So this new normal of family engagement, again, is liberatory in the way that we engage.

It's solidarity-driven.

In union and fellowship with our families, seeing our families as those co-designers, co-creators, co-authors.

Not that we are the all knowing beings in this partnership, shedding down our knowledge on others that are not knowing.

We have to stop that.

That's standing in the way of our partnerships, those attitudes, those judgements.

And then finally, our practice has to be equity-focused at all times.

Fair and just, where we go the extra mile, where we provide the extra resources that we need to make sure that everybody can be engaged in these partnerships.

So this new normal actually brings the framework to life, because that's really what I've been trying to say through the framework.

Particularly through the Conditions section of the framework.

And as we know, the framework says we have two types of conditions that we need to create for these partnerships to thrive.

We have the process conditions, and these are the conditions that every one of you in this room can look inside yourselves and interrogate and see, are we either practicing this or supporting this practice with our work?

The organizational conditions.

This is where our leaders, our district leaders, our state leaders, our federal leaders need to provide resources because as we know now, family engagement is a main ingredient to student success.

If we didn't learn that during the pandemic, then I don't know what to say, because like I said, no education happened without our families and our community members.

So we have to now embrace family engagement as a systemic practice in our work.

We also have to make sure that it's integrated and embedded in all systems.

So I always ask people, look at all the systems and structures you have in your district.

Are they enabling liberatory practice or are they really constraining liberatory practice?

So we have to look at those systems and structures.

Time.

How we allow our educators to use their time to engage with families.

Do we provide them with the professional development support?

So these are all embedded in the infrastructure that we create.

And then obviously we've gotta sustain this practice through resources.

I do want to double down on this one piece of the framework, and this is why I'm so excited to be sharing the stage today with Habeebah and Gina, because they're gonna talk about this.

Is that I really want us to concentrate on this first bullet in the framework, because we now know that unless we are intentional about focusing on building part partnerships of relational trust, where there's relational trust, nothing else is gonna happen.

None of the other bullets in the framework are going to come to life unless you have first really focused on building relationships of trust.

We cannot expect hundreds of years of oppression to vanish with one email or one phone call to parents.

Our families have felt this generational disrespect for a long time.

So we have to really focus on how do we build a new house.

I'm stealing this now from the provost, Bloomberg, who I met this morning.

She talked about Isabella Wilkerson's description of CAS, and she and I in the same wavelength, 'cause I actually use Isabella Wilkerson's work in my longer presentations.

You know, we may not have built the house of oppression, but we still live in those houses that were built hundreds of years ago.

So how do we change them to make sure that everybody is welcome?

So we really have to focus on being deliberate about creating relational trust.

Relational trust elements are respect, competence, integrity, personal regard.

This is a wonderful little chart that my student, Eyal Bergman, uses to check himself.

He asked himself these questions.

Okay, in terms of building respect, people feel respected when they feel listened to, when they feel heard.

So he says, "Am I seeking input from all of my families without bias?

In terms of competence, am I demonstrating to families that I'm competent, but that I also honor their role as valued and competent caregivers?

Do I keep my word with families?

And do I show my families that I value and care about them as people versus objects?"

Any of you who have read Paulo Freire, this is what he talks about.

We have to make sure we always see the people first and not the headlines, not the way that they have been characterized in the media.

And so where do we start?

I really feel very strongly that to start this work, to be able to start to transform our practice, to really engage in those process conditions, we have to first start with examining our implicit bias.

What is implicit bias?

Implicit bias is the relatively unconscious and relatively automatic features of prejudiced judgment and social behavior.

I'm learning a lot about how implicit bias is really implanted in our brains.

It comes from our surroundings.

It comes from our histories.

It becomes a part of our neurological patterns, the way we think and the way we behave.

It's also the automatic and unconscious stereotypes that drive us to behave and make decisions in certain ways.

And so what I'm learning, I have implicit bias.

We all do.

And I have to be very intentional.

All the time.

It's a journey.

Very intentional about thinking about, "Okay, how does that bias affect the way I see people, the way I read my students' work, my students' papers?"

How we do admissions.

And today we're talking about how do we work with our families?

So I really think this is where we have to start with trust.

Building trust, but to start building trust, we first have to really be intentional about examining our biases.

Some of you know, Beverly Tatum's wonderful work, and she talks about The Smog of Racism.

This is a picture of Los Angeles on a bad day when they're having a lot of smog.

We're breathing that in!

So it's not just racism, it's all kinds of -isms.

Ableism, right?

Classism, sexism.

We breathe it in.

It's there.

But the question is, what are we gonna do about it?

Are we gonna ignore it?

Because by ignoring it, we're then really on the path to creating barriers with our families.

So the work really begins with this willingness to examine our biases about families and communities and how those biases impact our practice.

Just gonna end by saying that I try very hard to keep up on a lot of the research and the conferences and things like that around family and community engagement, and I put that information on Twitter.

I'm not always on Twitter, but every once in a while, if you check there, you'll find some new information and announcements.

And I promise you, no pictures of puppies, kitties, or bunnies.

And with that, I'm gonna stop sharing and have my wonderful two sisters join me in this conversation.

- [Dan] Wonderful.

Karen Mapp, ladies and gentlemen.

(audience applauding) - Thank you.

- If you're just joining us on our lives stream or on the radio, you're listening to The City Club Forum.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, that's Dr. Karen Mapp of Harvard.

And with us on stage here at The City Club are Habeebah Grimes of the Positive Education Program, and Gina Garrett of Open Doors Academy and we're talking about family engagement.

I wanna say that the PowerPoint slides that you shared, Dr. Mapp, were very helpful and illustrative, and we'll be sharing them on our blog as well for all who are interested.

We really appreciate you breaking it down that way.

Habeebah Grimes, I wanna turn to you about this notion.

This "notion", that's really the wrong word, but about centering trust in our relationships with the families that we work with.

I know this is important to you.

It's part of the practice of PEP, part of your personal practice, but help us understand in how this works in practice through PEP.

- So trust is essential, we say at PEP.

And trust is the foundation for the depth of relationship that is necessary to accomplish difficult things, to overcome adversity, and to build the capacity of the brain in the young people that we seek to develop.

And so the reality of focusing on trust means there are certain actions that become necessary.

I love that reference to integrity.

And what I think about is I think about myself as a parent, the community of parents that I'm part of, but also our work at PEP.

Communication becomes one of the most critical strategies for creating trust, for establishing trust, helping our families know that we will share with you what's happening with your child, what's happening with the school community, what is important to the school in terms of its goals and values, and that communication is going both ways so that you can speak to those same things for your child as well.

- I should point out, it may be helpful for folks who aren't familiar with Positive Education Program, that you and your colleagues are helping to provide educational services to the children who our public school districts just cannot reach for one reason or another.

- Yes, I often say that the young people we serve, their needs exceed the resources of our public schools.

And so we are there for those young people out of urgency and necessity of helping young people with disabilities gain access to the curriculum, to the greatest extent possible.

And so that is the focus of our work in our day treatment centers.

But I have to say, I'm honored and humbled to be sitting here because in speaking to this issue, I am representing the partners that we work with, our school district partners in this conversation as well.

Our district partners speak to the high value they place on PEP's family support specialists, care and case management services, because those are essential to ensuring that family engagement is possible.

- Gina Garrett, Open Doors Academy provides out of school time services.

So after school and summer programming.

I should mention for the benefit of the audience, full disclosure, my wife is the CEO there.

(audience chuckles) But you manage all of the family engagement.

What specifically does that mean for Open Doors Academy?

- It's everything.

I think family engagement for Open Doors Academy is the central part of what we do, and it's not the supplemental part of what we do.

Without our families, as we have heard Dr. Mapp say earlier, we wouldn't be in the position that we are in right now in how our scholars have been able to maintain their academic excellence or even improve in their academic realms and move forward and increase.

So I think family for us, they become our families.

We look at our families as our families and that when we look at that Dual Capacity framework, and I'll be transparent, I'm starting to see even more of how it's essential in it being ODA with our families, led by our families.

And so it's in everything that we do.

we have to center everything around the feedback that we get from our families and bringing our families to the table to help us guide the decisions that we make and how we serve.

- I wanna note that we're talking about families.

We're not using the word parents right now.

We're talking about families.

Dr. Mapp, can you explain why this language choice is so important in your work and the work that we're talking about?

- Well, I think that my experience as Deputy Superintendent in Boston really was when I realized how important it was for us to use the terminology of family.

I told a story earlier today, how I made it my business when I was Deputy Sup to go to a lot of community meetings in Boston of the various groups, because I wanted families to see me and I wanted them to feel comfortable approaching me when I was in public, when I was at the supermarket, when I was walking down the street.

There's nothing like having family members come up and say, "Hi, Dr. Mapp, how are you?"

I just loved every minute of that.

And I was in the grocery store one day, and one of the grandparents that I had met told me that, she said, "Dr. Mapp, may I talk to you for a minute?

I said, "Sure."

And she said, "I just wanna tell you something that happened to me last week.

I went to my granddaughter's parent-teacher conference and the teacher said to me, she leaned in and whispered, 'When is the real parent gonna show up?'"

And she said, "I didn't even know what to say."

And it just really hit home to me that we- Again, there's an example of a bias, right?

And so what I wanted to do with my colleagues and others in the family engagement space was to send a message that we need to be using inclusive language.

And it may seem small, but it is a big deal to family members, all those adult caretakers, when we use language where they're recognized.

And so when we say parent, again, that unfortunately in cases it sometimes connotes a particular vision of one thing, "Leave It to Beaver", et cetera, et cetera.

You all know what I'm talking about.

And different notions of family sometimes don't come to mind when we use the word parent.

So we really push the Department of Education.

USDOE is now using family and parent engagement, but we really want people to know that when we say family, and then now even when we say parent, we want them to know we're including all those wonderful adult caretakers.

That means so much to our children.

- Gina Garrett, at Open Doors has that changed how you engage with families?

- Oh my God.

Yes.

I'll share an example with you.

I sat down with leadership and we had an honest conversation, and I had to bring to that conversation of what our family systems look like now.

They are not what I think- And we talk about implicit bias, right?

They're not what has been ingrained in our heads from TV shows or what we want our families to aspire to look like.

They are blended.

They are grandparents, they're aunts, they're uncles, they're older siblings even that make up our family system.

And we had to make some changes on our end on how our families even showed up for family events, right?

So not necessarily having to have a parent or a guardian or a legal parent or a legal guardian there.

Having anybody in that family system accompany those scholars so that they could take part in that activity, that event that we thought was so important, right?

To have and to have our families take part in.

So we had to kind of eat a lot of our biases and bring up to the table and be honest about 'em and say, "You know what, no, we don't need that."

What is the goal?

The goal is to get our scholars and our families experiencing different things around the city and taking part in some of the things that we feel will help strengthen them, further strengthen them, and that's the goal.

Oh, it's hit home pretty hard here in the last couple years.

- I'm sure.

- In a good way.

- I'm sure.

Habeebah Grimes, at Positive Education Program, what does the partnership with families look like?

What are you asking family members of your students, or hoping that family members of your students will do as part of that co-authoring of the educational journey?

- It should be acknowledged that the families we serve have endured a lot of adversity and transgenerational trauma.

And so the first thing we ask of our parents is for their trust and their confidence in our competence and our skill and our ability to build relational connections to their young people.

We simply want them to be welcome in that process.

That's what we desire and seek from them.

That they would feel welcome in that process.

There are a lot of formalities involved in special education.

Documents to be signed, plans to be made.

And the same in behavioral health, and PEP sits at that intersection.

But if we allow those administrative and administrivia- (laughs) Kinds of tasks to interfere with the relationships such that we don't allow a multi-generational engagement, an ecological engagement with the family and community that that young person resides within, we do a disservice to those parents and caregivers.

I'll also offer that relational health is critical to overcoming adversity.

It is the most important thing for young people, and any of us in this room, to build in order to overcome challenge and to thrive.

We build relational capacity with our families by inviting other folks to the table.

Is there a pastor involved?

We wanna know that person.

Is there a coach?

Is there a rec center person?

Is there a community agency that's involved?

Or can we get those folks involved?

We talk about natural supports and mobilizing and activating those natural supports, so that that parent has a village.

Because if the only person we're seeking to engage is the parent caregiver, we're setting at them at a disadvantage right out of the gate.

There's so many demands on them, and COVID has created such an intense level of stress that we have to focus on building relational capacity, relational health, and I often say relational wealth for the young people in our program.

- We are going to move to questions from the audience, both the listening audience and the audience here at The City Club in a second, but I wanna give all of you an opportunity to address race and racism.

Dr. Mapp, you had a slide up earlier about the smog, referring to the smog of racism.

I mean, let's just talk about what role... All of this is about reframe how the challenges that have been brought about by structural racism.

Dr. Mapp, the thing that you said before that I just, it was so well said, that we're not going to erase centuries of oppression with one email.

And I want to invite you first, and then our panelists here on the stage to talk a little bit more about how this is fundamentally about addressing structural racism with a framework that honors the people with whom we hope to work.

- Well, I think that I've been very much... My practice now has been very much informed by the work of Ibram Kendi, who wrote the wonderful book, "How to Be an Antiracist".

And I highly would recommend the book.

Really got me thinking a lot about what role do we all play, including myself, in upholding a lot of the systems and structures that have been put in place to keep certain groups with all the power and certain groups without power?

And I do think that we've gotta be willing... And I do think a lot of this pushback on things like CRT, which I find fascinating because that's a theoretical research epistemological tool that now has been turned into something else.

But I think people are scared to really look in the mirror and to ask ourselves questions about how have we... We haven't at some of these systems and structures, but our responsibility is to dismantle them and change them.

And so I do think that without a willingness to look at the systems and structures and ask ourselves, "Okay, what am I doing to continue to uphold these in my own work?"

And it's not just for one group to do that interrogation.

It's for all of us to do that interrogation, I recently was a part of a search where I was asking candidates questions, and one of the questions we asked of everybody, regardless of their race, was how have they examined their own leadership practices in a critical way where they can talk about what were their moments when they realized that they actually were buying into systems of oppression and upholding them.

And some of the candidates stumbled.

They had a tough time with that.

"What do you mean?

I'm progressive.

I support equity."

- I'd have to imagine, Dr. Mapp, that every candidate struggled with that question.

(audience chuckled) - Well, actually.

Actually, one candidate didn't, and that's the person we hired!

- Well done!

Well done!

(audience clapping) Very well done.

- And so I think, Dan, it's complicated, but I have to admit it's invigorating to have these kinds of conversations with people.

They're not scary.

They allow us to be vulnerable.

I think that's really important too, is that we have to be willing to be vulnerable with each other.

And so I know this is that probably more than you asked for, but that's why I said, I think that the conversation has to begin with us talking about our biases, and then how might those biases actually work to be supporting the very things that we say that we wanna dismantle.

- Thank you.

Briefly, because I wanna get to questions.

I want us to get to questions from the audience, but Gina Garrett, anything else to add to that?

- I echo everything, Dr. Mapp.

I think I have seen more with ODA of us being vulnerable with our parents and transparent with our parents and our families about where we got it wrong and where we need to start and what do we need to change?

And it's trickling down, gratefully, into our staff, into other infrastructures and our partnerships that we have.

It is an invigorating and beautiful thing, but like you said, Dr. Mapp, we have to be comfortable with being vulnerable and we have to be honest with ourselves.

And I think if we are in the field of being partners with our families and wanting to see better outcomes, then we have to start with ourselves in a lot of ways and be honest with ourselves in a lot of ways in order to help continue that movement and that growth mindset that we're using to bring those services to our families.

- Habeebah Grimes?

- Many school districts around the country and other social service kinds of organizations have said, "We are trauma informed."

And it is not possible to be trauma informed without understanding the history and current manifestations of racism, which create and sustain the conditions for suffering that we charge ourselves with ameliorating.

And so that would be my statement, is we have to be honest.

(audience applauding) We have to be honest, and we have to keep elected officials and policymakers accountable for the necessary honesty that will help us create the change that we seek.

- Habeebah Grimes runs Positive Education Program.

Gina Garrett runs Family Engagement at Open Doors Academy.

Dr. Karen Mapp teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

And we are talking about family engagement.

We're moving to the audience Q&A.

If you would like to join us at the microphones here in the room, we've got staff who can help you do that.

If you want to text a question, you can text it to 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet it @TheCityClub and we'll work it into the program.

I think we have our first question coming in electronically.

- Yes we do.

I have a text question here from the Lakewood school board.

Nora from the Lakewood school board.

"How has the student mental health crisis, exasperated by the pandemic, affect family engagement strategies?"

- Dr. Mapp, could you hear that okay?

We're gonna start with you.

- Actually, I would defer to Habeebah on this one, because this is her lane!

- I was thinking you might provide a national point of view, but okay, let's start with Habeebah then, as you insist.

- This is her lane.

I'll come back, but this is definitely her lane.

- Okay.

- My belief is that the crisis of the pandemic, and especially the time children spent, young people spent at home learning virtually undermined the confidence for families and young people in schools' capacity to safely educate them.

We say education is critical and important, and yet there was this huge disruption, and families felt very isolated in trying to address the disruption.

And the systemic inequities made that disruption more profound.

And so the mental health crisis we are seeing with young people was very predictable, in my view.

Young people are disillusioned, they are angry, they are afraid.

Parents and caregivers and family members are disillusioned and frustrated and afraid and overwhelmed, and our educators are in that same space.

So what is very heartbreaking, frankly, to witness is that everybody's cup is at half full right now.

And I think we should be looking to the intuitive wisdom that's baked in the research around family engagement, baked in the research around trauma informed practice, that we can heal, we can overcome this.

We can do the micro steps that are gonna be uncomfortable, but build our resilience.

Dr. Jennifer King recently published a blog post about building resilience through predictable, manageable levels of stress and engagement with stress.

Human beings are built for recovery from adversity, but we need the trust in our ability to do that so that we mobilize those things that will help us heal.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding) Dr. Mapp, more to add from that?

- You know, Dan, I think that we have all underestimated the mental health challenge that COVID and the systemic racism pieces that I talked about, I think we've grossly underestimated the impact of all of that's happened in the last two years on everybody in this room and on everybody outside this room.

And I am a bit dismayed that we don't acknowledge that, because I think that when- I've watched my wonderful superintendents from around the country rush to go back to normal, and they haven't been given the opportunity, in many cases, to acknowledge the fact that we are all traumatized by what's happened.

I had one school district, a small school district where they decided to start over.

They closed schools down again for a week and started over.

And the entire week was built on love.

Love.

On letting people know how much they loved each other, on tending to social-emotional support, not just for the kids, but for also the adults in the community.

And when they spent the time and took the time to acknowledge the trauma that everybody is facing, then they were able to start fresh and anew, without a lot of the incidents and things like that that we've been seeing.

So I do feel that, I know the question was about the focus on the students, but I think we've gotta really be thinking about how do we take care of each other throughout this period and take the time to allow ourselves to take care of ourselves and our neighbors and our friends and our families and our students.

We've got to make the time to do that, and I think when we skip over that, we're gonna still end up with some very unfortunate circumstances in our schools and in our communities.

- Thank you, Dr. Mapp, that's actually very hopeful and makes me want to go back in the classroom, strangely.

(everyone chuckles) Next question.

- Yes, in terms of parental family involvement, it's been my observation that one group that is really out there is the immigrant refugee families.

They really seem to take an interest in their child's education.

Have all the panelists found this to be so?

- Thank you.

Dr. Mapp or any of our panelists, any thoughts specifically on refugee families?

- I'll speak quickly and say I believe all parents care are deeply about the education of their children.

(audience applauding) Refugee families have unique circumstances to endure and overcome, but I think an important place of just shared understanding is that every family wants their young person to do well and have a future, educationally.

- I echo that.

That is the same thing that we have seen across the board, is that our families are, they have skills, they have the strength, and they have the ability to meet us where we are, right?

And it is not tied to a specific culture or a specific race, it is universal.

And so I echo that, Habeebah, and it's universal.

Family engagement doesn't mean that there is a lack of.

It means that there is an importance for.

(audience vocalizing in agreement) - Wow.

(audience applauding) Gina Garrett!

Go ahead.

Next question, please.

- We're getting a lot of virtual questions.

So this one is from Twitter.

"Generally schools often engage with families around academic focused items.

Report card pickups, FAFSA, et cetera.

How can our school partners do a better job of using their facilities to improve engagement with families beyond academic success?"

- It's a jump ball, who wants it?

(audience chuckles) Habeebah just threw it to you, Karen.

- Okay.

Well, you know, this is where I talk a lot about the professional development training that has to happen.

Unfortunately, many of our educators have not been trained in how to engage effectively with families.

And so, consequently- Again, for example, when we talk about building trust, the link to learning piece and the framework is real because families do want to be a partner in not just the academic development, but in development of the whole child.

Social-emotional, physical, mental.

It's not just the academic piece, but it's the how that we do it.

You could try to engage with families around academics in a way that's very off-putting and very disrespectful to families, or you can engage with families around academics in a way where you see them as co-partners.

So it's the how of it, whether it's around academics or around sports or around all the various wonderful ways that our children engage with our educators, but it's the how that it's done.

And if it's done with respect, if it's been done in a way where, again, families are seen as a partner, and I agreed with the comments before that all families want to be engaged with their children's education, regardless of that family's background, I've never met a parent who didn't wanna be engaged.

It's just that we've put up a whole lot of barriers to that engagement.

So it takes some professional development, again, because unfortunately, and I think we're getting better in the higher ed community in training our educators on the most effective strategies to engage families across all areas when it comes to helping to support their children.

- Dr. Mapp, I wanna ask a follow up about this.

The schools are strapped right now.

They don't have a lot of people who can do the work.

Teachers are covering for one another because many are out sick.

What do you find- And one of the things that we've been implementing here in Cleveland through the Say Yes model is the presence of family support specialists in almost every school, will be every school by a certain date in the near future.

Next year.

Thank you.

September, by September.

Are you finding from a national point of view that having somebody whose job is specifically around family engagement is a helpful model for this, or does it work better when teachers are able to do it themselves?

- It's actually, Dan, a both and.

- [Dan] Okay.

- So I think that what has had happened in some cases is that schools will hire a parent coordinator, they have lots of different names.

And, in fact, one of my former students, Ann Ishimaru, has done some wonderful work on this.

The problem is is that if that person is there to basically represent all of the oppressive systems that have been established in a school, and they become the representative of that, right?

So their job is to get those darn parents to do what the school wants them to do, right?

If that's their role, it's a failure.

It's a failure, okay?

If their role, however, is to help be a coach at the school to help the entire school community become a family friendly place.

For example, if they're a part of the instructional leadership team or they help design trainings, and they're there to actually help be sort of a real liaison between the school community and the family community, then that's where it works well.

Where the school says, "You are gonna help enable us to be better partners with our families."

Versus, "You are there to get those darn parents to agree with what we're doing."

Right?

- Right.

- And unfortunately... We call that the assimilationist strategy, where that person is put in place to help to assimilate families into the school culture versus have a partnership between home and school where school values family and family values school.

It's not just one way.

So you can see even there, Dan, we try to do some trainings around how to best leverage that position.

And in some cases it does depend on the context of the school.

But I think that the mindset around why that person is there is really critically important.

- Well, Dr. Karen Mapp, we're gonna hold you to your promise that you made at the very beginning that you'll come back in person when you can, but we are at the end of our hour.

(audience applauding) Dr. Karen Mapp is with the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Gina Garrett has been with us as well from Open Doors Academy, and Habeebah Grimes from Positive Education Program.

Our forum today, part of our Education Innovation series, and also our annual Bernice Carrigan Smith Forum on Education, made possible thanks to members of Bernice Carrigan Smith's family in honor of her distinguished teaching career, which began in Licking County and eventually led her to the Cleveland public schools.

We'd also like to welcome guests at tables hosted by PNC, the Greater Cleveland School Superintendents Association, Open Doors Academy, Cleveland Metropolitan School District, the Cleveland Transformation Alliance, Wickliffe High School students, hello, and the Smith family and Positive Education Program.

(audience applauding) Thank you all for being here today.

Make sure to join us on Friday, January 28th.

We will learn more about Cleveland's own NASA Glenn Research Center and how they continue to push boundaries of innovation in space and aeronautics research.

We'll be hearing from Dr. Marla Perez Davis, Director of NASA Glenn Research Center.

She'll be in conversation with Kirsten Ellenbogen of our Great Lake Science Center.

That brings us to the end of our program today.

Thank you so much, members and friends of The City Club.

Thank you, Gina and Habeebah and Dr. Karen Mapp.

Our forum is now adjourned.

- And thank you, Dan.

Thank you.

Thank you, Dan.

- Thank you!

Thank you.

(audience applauding) - [Announcer] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of The City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(bright tone) - [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club Forums on Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.