Guilford Parent Academy: A Collaborative Effort to Engage Parents in Children's Education

This paper describes the development of the Guilford Parent Academy (GPA), which is a school district-community collaboration developed to promote parent engagement and to assist families by providing online and face-to-face access to resources to help raise a successful and healthy child. Evaluation results over a four-year period suggest that the GPA innovative strategies and programs for reaching parents are increasingly effective within this large, culturally diverse school district. For example, GPA uses free online user accounts to allow parents to access a variety of resources to assist their children's academic and social development. GPA on the Go offers face-to-face workshops at places of business or community settings that broaden the reach of parent engagement programs beyond the confines of the school. Lastly, Parent Ambassadors are working to create peer-to-peer parent networks to engage families and share resources with schools receiving Title I funds. Workshop offerings, online user accounts, and parent participation increased over a four-year period since this initiative was founded. We discuss the utility of the conceptual model and potential for replication of Parent Academy initiatives in other school districts, as well as future research directions.