萝莉网

It has become a bedrock principle in school administration that community engagement is desirable and even essential in improving our schools. In the current era of conflict over school policies and the resulting contentious school board meetings (see, for example, Robertson, 2021 and Carr & Waldron, 2023), community engagement has become both more critical and more difficult to accomplish effectively. The question about how to engage the community may be an obstacle to  superintendents and school districts taking the steps necessary to harness the power of such efforts. While community engagement may enjoy wide acclaim as an essential tool for school districts theoretically, superintendents may be ambivalent about undertaking it in practice. When asked how they feel when they think of community engagement, 65 leaders of State School Administrator Associations created the word cloud shown in Figure 1. (Howick, Axelbank, & Bales, 2023).

While 鈥渆ssential鈥� and other positive words got the most mentions, other responses convey more ambivalence: obligated, divisive[ness], consuming, vulnerable, agitation, challenging, torn, volatile. It is clear from such reactions that these district leaders have mixed feelings about what might be involved with engaging their community. In addition, one can speculate that this doubt may be driven in part by lack of knowledge or experience as to how best to conduct community engagement.