Four Lessons for Strengthening Family Partnership to Boost Literacy

Reading is the foundation for nearly everything else a child will learn, and the adults who shape that foundation extend far beyond the classroom. When schools and families work as real partners, kids read more—and parents and caregivers gain the confidence to help. 

So, what can schools do to strengthen family partnership?

Since 2022, CPRL has supported family engagement in New York City Public Schools’ literacy effort called NYC Reads. We’ve built resources like the NYC Reads Family Partnership Toolkit, trained hundreds of school and district staff, and worked alongside eight school-CBO “lab sites” during the 2025-26 school year. Here are four key lessons we took away from that work. They come from New York City, but any school or district leader trying to bring families into literacy can apply them to move their efforts forward. 

Lesson 1: Put families at the instructional core

Family partnership often sits downstream of instructional planning, treated as a side task for family-facing staff or individual teachers. But families are part of how children learn to read, so the people who understand families, instruction, and decision-making need to plan together.

P.S. 160 shows what this looks like. Its team combined three perspectives: family engagement, instruction, and administration. Family-facing staff knew how to reach caregivers, instructional staff tied ideas to daily classroom learning, and administrators had the authority to move plans forward. The team met regularly, protected time for the work, and split tasks so no one person carried too much.

The results showed up in familiar places. At the school’s Trunk-O-Read event, each decorated car matched its classroom’s current book, and staff offered book-talk guidance and Sora sign-ups alongside the treats. At the book fair, the family engagement staff member kept toolkit materials on hand. After teachers completed Science of Reading training, the school offered “Moves to Try at Home” micro-workshops. Families now communicate more often with teachers and feel more confident encouraging reading at home.

Lesson 2: Make use of existing structures before creating new ones

Standalone family initiatives, especially inconsistent ones, add to system fatigue. A better approach is to route family partnership through roles and meetings that already exist.

CPRL worked with NYCPS’s Division of School Leadership to do this. Rather than building a new network, we turned to the people and systems already connecting districts to schools: Family Leadership Coordinators (FLCs), Family Support Coordinators (FSCs), and other district family-facing staff. We introduced the toolkit in a series of training sessions, then ran train-the-trainer sessions where leaders practiced sharing it with their own teams. More than 110 leaders signed up, over half of them FLCs and FSCs who collectively serve hundreds of schools. Instructional staff were invited too, so family partnership stayed linked to what children were actually learning.

The same idea works at the school level. P.S. 375’s new Parent Coordinator started with a simple question: where do families already gather? The school partnered with Barbershop Books to run literacy tables at its well-attended community celebrations, where families could “shop” for free book bundles and get help logging into their children’s Sora accounts. 

Lesson 3: Prioritize family partnership explicitly, and measure to learn

Without clear expectations, family partnership gets crowded out by competing demands. And without an eye toward future improvement, teams have no room to reflect and improve.

District 1 offers a better model. Superintendents, Deputy Superintendents, and district-level family-facing staff (such as FLCs and FSCs) joined monthly school planning meetings, backed ideas with resources and personnel, and returned for debriefs. This helped P.S. 20, its community partner Henry Street, and the district team put on Winter Wonderland—a district-wide family event that combined literacy activities, free library books, Sora sign-ups, and information about community programs. Parent coordinators from other schools were invited to the event to build capacity district-wide. Families were encouraged to “double their time” with books by finding places outside the home to practice literacy— including newly created  “Reading Hubs” at Essex Market and the Vladeck Houses, a collaborative community effort designed to bring free literacy resources directly to Lower East Side families. District leaders also made the priority visible by showing up, which tied the commitment to real decisions about people, resources, and follow-through.

Measurement tools can support this kind of learning too. The family partnership toolkit contains “family exit tickets,” for example, that make measurement quick and consistent. A few simple survey items (e.g. “was this helpful or not?”) helped lab site teams adjust and improve.  

Lesson 4: Invite families to shape technology policy

Technology now sits inside literacy work. Across our lab sites, tools like Sora were woven into events, from Trunk-O-Read to community celebrations. These tools can widen access to books in many languages, but they only help if families actually use them.

That’s why families should have a voice in decisions about the tools meant to serve them. We encourage districts to co-design technology policy with families, whether in existing structures like Community Education Councils, District Leadership Teams, and School Leadership Teams or in dedicated task forces. These groups can review emerging literacy tools, monitor how technology supports instruction, and give feedback on proposed guidance. 

So, where to begin?

If these four lessons feel like a lot, take the advice that P.S. 375’s experience offers any leader: start small. Begin with one family touchpoint and one need to address. Explore a relevant resource, identify someone who can help, and use what you learn to plan the next step.

Across every school and district we worked with, the pattern was the same. Family partnership grew through repeated cycles of trying, reflecting, and adjusting, supported by cross-functional teams, existing structures, and leaders who kept showing up.

Click here to explore the NYC Reads Family Partnership Toolkit.