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Low-income parents participate less in schools than higher-income parents despite the benefits of parent involvement. Barriers that low-income parents face suggest that schools must develop a new approach to engaging these parents. School counselors can play a leadership role in strengthening the relationship between schools and low-income parents by implementing community centered strategies for parent involvement. These strategies respect community culture and parents' abilities to contribute to their children's education.
Parental involvement in the schools is associated with student improvement in a variety of areas including academic performance, attitudes and behavior, attendance, school adjustment and engagement, and graduation rates (Barnard, 2004; Epstein, 2001; Simons-Morton & Crump, 2003). A recent meta-analysis of 41 studies found a significant relationship between parental school involvement and academic achievement of urban students, both White students and students of color (Jeynes, 2005).
Despite the positive benefits to their children, low socioeconomic status (SES) parents participate less in the schools than their higher SES counterparts (Benson & Martin, 2003; Lareau, 1996; Singh, Bickley, Trivette, Keith, & Keith, 1995). This may be due to a number of barriers that low-income parents face in attempts at school involvement, which include not only demographic and psychological obstacles, but also barriers generated by the school itself.
School personnel understand the importance of parent involvement, and educational writers promote the idea of the home-school partnership (e.g., Fuller & Olsen, 1998; Pelco, Jacobson, Ries, & Melka, 2000; Raffaele & Knoff, 1999). However, many approaches to parent involvement primarily focus on school needs as they relate to children's education. For example, parents are invited to support school activities in the classroom, on field trips, and in the library or school office. Although these strategies are essential to parent involvement, strategies targeting low-income parents for involvement may call for a broader focus. From interviews of teachers from a low-income, culturally diverse, urban community, Lawson (2003) found that teachers viewed parent involvement from a schoolcentric frame of reference, that is, how parents can help the schools promote students' education. However, Lawson found that, although parent interviews also conveyed this school-focused theme, parents' stories further communicated a broader communitycentric frame of reference, that is, how community concerns related to the future of their children. In designing strategies to involve low-income parents...