Rural Voices Listening Tour 

The West Virginia Family Engagement Center was selected to participate in a national rural family engagement fellowship with the Flamboyan Foundation. This national partnership with the Flamboyan Foundation enabled the West Virginia Family Engagement Center to work alongside school districts and school to enhance effective family engagement practices in West Virginia Schools by creating innovative and immersive events for rural families to share their experiences with family engagement through the Rural Family Voices Listening Tour. The Rural Family Voices Listening Tour incorporates family leader focus groups to collect data related to family attitudes and perceptions regarding family engagement and academic achievement to support West Virginia schools and families. The information from these families, as well as triangulated data from the schools, supports improved learning outcomes, along with opportunities for enhanced trust, transparency, and communication—amplifying the often-unheard rural voices in family engagement.

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Key Goals: 

1. The listening tour elevates both the voices and lived experiences of students and families to inform schools of challenges and opportunities related to family engagement. 

2. The listening tour builds a context for the importance of family engagement within underserved and underrepresented rural communities in West Virginia. The information from participating families, as well as participating schools and counties will help to support improved learning outcomes, along with cultivating enhanced trust, transparency, and communication to strengthen family-school partnership. 

3. The Rural Family Voices Listening Tour creates an opportunity for enhanced community landscape work, as well as greater participation from families in collecting needs assessment data that was not previously available to West Virginia schools.