Author: Vrinda Kokje
More than 4,200 educators, family advocates, district leaders, and community organizers filled the Long Beach Convention Center last week for the Institute for Educational Leadership’s (IEL) 2026 National Community Schools and Family Engagement Conference. It was the largest gathering in the event’s history.
The theme was “Guiding Lights, Brighter Futures.” Across three days of plenaries, workshops, and candid conversations, one message rang out again and again: the field isn’t just evolving. It’s transforming.
The TalkingPoints team was there to listen, learn, and connect. Here’s what we brought home.
Key Takeaways
- Family engagement must be a strategy to achieve outcomes, not a standalone goal
- Move from involvement to empowerment: families as co-designers, not just attendees
- Two-way, multilingual communication is the foundation of genuine partnership
- Three out of five parents receive zero positive outreach from schools each year
- Lasting change requires systems and institutional commitment, not just individual champions
The Word “Involvement” Isn’t Enough Anymore
One of the most energizing sessions came from Dr. Jackie Sanderlin, who has spent 30+ years building community in some of Southern California’s most under-resourced districts. Her challenge to the room was simple and pointed: stop aiming for involvement. Aim for empowerment.
It’s a distinction that sounds small but changes everything. Involvement positions families as recipients. Empowerment positions them as partners, co-designers of the school experience, not just attendees of events planned without them.
That sentiment carried through nearly every session we attended. Presenters from Lake Washington School District, Keller Elementary, and the California Community Schools Partnership Program all named the same shift: moving away from one-way, transactional communication toward genuine two-way relationships.
“Family engagement must be a strategy to achieve outcomes, not a standalone goal.” — Dr. Karen Mapp, Harvard Graduate School of Education
When engagement is treated as an add-on, one more item alongside other district priorities, it becomes the first thing dropped when things get hard. Dr. Mapp’s point is a challenge to every leadership team: if family engagement isn’t embedded in how you pursue your goals, it isn’t really a priority at all.
One presenter offered a garden analogy worth holding onto: “If the vegetables don’t grow, you don’t blame the vegetables.” If families aren’t engaging, the first question shouldn’t be “what’s wrong with them?” It should be: “Are we creating the conditions where they can thrive?”
Two-Way Communication Is Infrastructure, Not a Feature
In a session led by Ari Gerzon-Kessler on practical family engagement strategies, something stood out: TalkingPoints was named directly as a model for the kind of instant, two-way digital communication that actually moves families to action.
The presenter shared stories most educators will recognize. School leaders spent two weeks trying to reach a family to schedule a conference. Once a translated text message was sent home, a meeting was able to be scheduled in just five minutes. In another instance, volunteers were secured for a last-minute field at 9:30 p.m., because a text was able to reach families where they were and allow them to respond immediately.
These aren’t small anecdotes. They’re evidence of a deeper truth: communication barriers are engagement barriers. When families speak languages other than English, when they lack reliable internet access, when they’re juggling two jobs and don’t have time to navigate a portal or take a phone call, transactional outreach fails them. And when families disengage, students feel it.
Real communication tools need to meet families where they are, in the language they speak, on the device they already use. That’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation everything else is built on.
The Families Who Need Us Most Are Often the Ones We Reach Last
A recurring theme across conference sessions was the persistent gap between who shows up and who doesn’t. One presenter noted that most family engagement efforts end up serving three or four of the same parents, typically those who already have access and confidence to navigate school systems. The families who are typically more difficult to reach include multilingual families, families navigating poverty, and families who have had previous negative school experiences.This gap is a system failure, not a family failure.
Attendees also heard from Dr. Hedy Chang from Attendance Works, a national organization focused on improving student attendance. Chang shared how chronic absenteeism became a disaggregated accountability metric, emphasizing that data broken down by race, language, and socioeconomic status exposes where systems are falling short and who is being left behind.
The solution isn’t creating more events or sending more of the same communications to the same groups of people. It’s building outreach that is genuinely inclusive with translated communication, proactive outreach systems, and intentional recruitment of voices that haven’t historically been heard.
Read our 5 tips for improving student attendance with family partnerships.
Positive Outreach Changes the Relationship
One of the most practical ideas we encountered during the conference came from a session on communication systems. The concept: structure regular time for educators to make positive contact with families. Messages that say, “I just wanted you to know your child did something wonderful today.”
One high school reported sending nearly 1,500 positive postcards in a single school year. Another carved out ten minutes at monthly staff meetings for positive calls, with 50 staff members reaching roughly 200 families each month who might otherwise only hear from school when something went wrong.
This strategy is crucial because data shows that 3 out of 5 parents receive zero positive outreach from their child’s school in a given year. That statistic isn’t just striking. It’s an opportunity, because trust, once built, changes everything.
Learn how to build strong family partnerships with positive school culture — Watch the webinar.
Sustainable Change Requires Systems, Not Just Champions
Perhaps the most important theme across the conference was lasting family engagement doesn’t live in the passion of a single dedicated teacher or a heroic principal. It lives in systems.
Lake Washington School District shared their four-phase approach to embedding family engagement at scale:
- Establish cabinet level buy-in
- Explore district leadership capacity building
- Launch innovation lab sites
- cale practices across everyschool.
Their superintendent set the tone for this framework, “Without family engagement, we cannot do school improvement.”
That kind of institutional commitment, where family engagement appears in budgets, in staff time, and in evaluation criteria, is what separates programs that last from initiatives that disappear when a leader changes.
TalkingPoints: Built for This Moment
What struck us most about IEL 2026 wasn’t that the ideas were new. It’s that the urgency was higher than ever. Two-thirds of parents are experiencing burnout. The majority of educators feel their profession isn’t respected. Sixty percent of families say their school experience has room for significant improvement.
These aren’t abstract statistics. They’re the communities we work with every day.
TalkingPoints was built for this exact challenge: to make the kind of warm, personalized, two-way communication that makes building trust not just possible, but scalable. Our platform reaches families in 150+ languages, requires no app, no Wi-Fi, and no login. Schools using TalkingPoints see a 24% reduction in chronic absenteeism, gains equivalent to six additional days of learning per student, and fewer suspensions.
The conference made clear that the education community knows what family partnership should look like. TalkingPoints exists to help make it real, for every school, every family, every student.
