Brittany Harris (middle)
My name is Brittany Harris and I am one of the assistant principals at Lafayette High School (Fayette County). It has been a pleasure joining the Lafayette High School team and being able to experience all of the wonderful opportunities provided for students and families.
Over the years, our school has been known to invite families into the building for many different student learning engagement activities. We truly believe the partnership between home and school is what contributes to the success of our students. During the 2022-2023 school year, our school was first certified as a Family Friendly School by the Kentucky Collaborative for Families and Schools with the Prichard Committee and we were recertified for this school year. Lafayette takes pride in being acknowledged for this honorable award. This certification gives us an opportunity to share with others the work behind one of our core beliefs, engaging families.
The first part of preparing to be recognized as a school that is Family Friendly is establishing a team. Fayette County requires each school to have a family and community engagement team, so this is aligned directly with what is required for the Prichard Committee. While the Prichard Committee requires two teachers, two parents and one administrator, we are fortunate to be able to exceed that: we have four teachers, two mental health specialists, one youth service center coordinator, three parents, one school resource officer and one administrator.
Our school has many diverse families, therefore we want to be sure that our family and community engagement committee includes a broad array of expertise to bridge different gaps between school and home.
Family engagement is built around just that: engagement. In order to entice more families to be involved our team must be diverse to meet the needs of ALL families and students.
We believe building a team that reflects the diversity of our families will generate better engagement. We meet once a month to discuss our initiatives and plan our family engagement activities. During our meetings the real work takes place. We plan ways that families can engage in student learning throughout the school year.
A prior assistant principal, Tommy Johnson, initiated our first Family Friendly Schools certification by highlighting practices already in place. This year the FACE team and myself came together for the recertification process, which seemed to be a bit more cumbersome. We had to provide two new initiatives for every domain provided by the Prichard Committee. As a result, we provided evidence of the items and made the changes necessary for recertification.
Our family and community engagement team at the district level believes in the work that we are doing here at Lafayette with our families. They have always supported our initiatives and will continue to provide support in the future. We are proud to be noted as one of the Family Friendly Schools for 2023-2024 school year.
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