State Leadership for Family Engagement: A Four-Part Webinar Series
- Mike Andrews
- Jul 13
- 3 min read
Most people picture family engagement as a building-level thing. Back to school night. The parent-teacher conference. The sign-up sheet for classroom volunteers taped up by the front office. That picture is not wrong. It is just incomplete.
The conditions that decide whether any of that adds up to something get set way upstream, at the state level, in offices most families will never walk into. A building can have the most committed teacher and the most organized family on the roster and still watch the partnership stall, because the system around them was never built to hold it. Policy sets the conditions. Leadership decides whether anyone uses them. That upstream work is the focus of a new national webinar series running this August and September.
What The Family Engagement Series Is
State Leadership for Family Engagement: From Policy to Practice to Impact is a four-part national series built for the people working to strengthen family engagement at state and district levels. Think State Educational Agency (SEA) staff, state partners, and the state and district leaders responsible for setting direction across whole systems instead of single schools.
The series is organized by the Rocky Mountain Family Engagement Collective (RMFEC) and hosted by Lacy Wood from RMC Research Corporation, with the Keystone Policy Center, and Coaction Collective.
Each session runs at 1:00 PM MT and features national experts alongside state leaders doing the work in real time.
Here is what each session covers.
Thursday, August 13 | 1:00 PM MT
The opener gets into the "why." What does the research actually say about family engagement, what does policy make possible, and where do states fit in all of it? This is the groundwork session, connecting evidence to the role state agencies can play in setting conditions for everything that follows.
Leading Statewide Efforts and Cross-SEA Collaboration
Thursday, August 27 | 1:00 PM MT
Family engagement does not live in one office. This session looks at how to lead the work across a state agency, build collaboration between offices that do not always talk to each other, and align systems so the effort holds up over time.
Supporting District Implementation
Thursday, September 3 | 1:00 PM MT
Vision is one thing. Helping districts actually do the work is another. This session moves from building leadership capacity to the practical question of how states support districts putting meaningful family engagement into practice on the ground.
Thursday, September 24 | 1:00 PM MT
The closer is about what happens after the launch. How do you use data to show progress, measure what matters, and sustain the practices that work instead of letting them fade once the funding cycle turns over?
Why It Matters
Families are assets, not problems to manage. That belief is easy to say at a conference and hard to build into a system. A lot of family engagement still runs on compliance: a checklist, a required notice, a meeting nobody remembers. The harder and more honest work is building the structures that let real partnership happen, and that work depends on the people making decisions at the state level.
This series is a chance to learn from states getting it right and to wrestle with the parts that are still hard. For anyone who does this work, or leads the people who do, it is worth the time.
Full series, session details, and registration are here: rmfec.org/webinar-series