Education Week - February 22, 2017 - 42

LESSONS FROM
A LEADER

Set Clear Goals
Family-engagement
policies need clear success
indicators for families and
students. Use tools like
school improvement plans
and teacher- and parentsurvey data to guide
staff training and
support efforts.

Share
Responsibility
Share decisionmaking
and show a willingness
to share the speaker's
stage. Create and sustain
meaningful platforms to
give district and school
staff opportunities to
listen
and learn from families
and students.

Value
Relationships
Data, research,
and policies are
important. But there's
no match for the value
that comes from strong,
empowering relationships
between educators,
students, and
their families.

full-throated participants in advocating for their
children in their schools and shaping policy across
the district.
Now, Federal Way is held up as a statewide model
for parent engagement, says Penelope Mena, a
program supervisor in Washington state's education
agency. For districts seeking to launch or enhance
parent outreach, Moore is a go-to adviser.
Moore, whose two adult children attended schools
in Federal Way, grew up on the east coast. Her
parents were teachers and even they sometimes felt
frustrated by their efforts to advocate for her two,
much younger brothers in public schools. Moore was
disheartened to watch as they fell through the cracks.
"My parents were public school teachers who
did everything they could," Moore says. "It left me
wondering what I could do to help the parents of kids
whose experiences were similar to my brothers feel
more engaged and more successful."

Nontraditional Path
Around 2002, Moore was working on a master's
degree in project management and was serving as
the chairwoman of the local Habitat for Humanity, as
well as a community task force on diversity.
Through that community-based work, she met
Thomas R. Murphy, then the superintendent of the
Federal Way schools. He was concerned that black
and Hispanic students weren't performing as well as
their white peers and was looking for ways to reach
their parents, some of whom weren't going to necessarily gravitate to the PTA.
Moore gave him ideas on how to "make the system
welcoming for all parents, especially for parents who
may have never experienced success in public school
system themselves," Murphy says. That included
convening conversations with "affinity groups" of
parents who shared a cultural heritage or background, and collaborating with new partners, like
churches and community-based organizations that
already had relationships with parents the district
wanted to reach. Moore also wanted to help schools
develop new strategies for reaching parents.
The two stayed in touch, and three years after they
first met, Murphy created a position with Moore in
mind. She succeeded beyond his loftiest expectations.
"What Trise did was she took a conversation she
had with me and turned it into more than she or I
imagined it could be," says Murphy, now retired. "I
was always racing to catch up with her. I never had
to spur her on."
Moore started to carve out her niche through a
series of community meetings. She recruited a crosssection of more than a dozen parents who could
help her devise new systems and structures to meet
families' needs.
"I decided I was going to learn from the families
that people were calling 'hard to reach,'" Moore
recalls. In listening to them, she discovered "covert barriers" that kept some parents from getting

Education Week Leaders To Learn From 2017

involved.
Moore says the group identified a disconnect between highly educated and middle class school staff
and many of the district's working class families
with a lower level of education. "Very few people
want to go into a meeting where they are in the minority ... if [a relationship] hasn't been established in
advance," Moore says.
Moore and her core group of parents ultimately
settled on having quarterly meetings for all parents
in which they could ask direct questions of district
leaders, including the superintendent. Eventually, another set of quarterly meetings was added
for community partners to come and query district
administrators. Moore also held informal meetings at
the request of particular groups of parents.
Angela Griffin first met Moore when she wanted to
address an issue stemming from an awards night at
her daughter's school. Moore, she says, helped her
develop a plan for approaching the school's principal
and finding a solution. That experience inspired
Griffin to volunteer with Moore, serving as a mentor
to other parents seeking to do advocacy in the
district and helping to lead workshops on the
issue.

"Trise is one person and she can only advocate
so far," Griffin says "There were instances where
parents would see her as district person that they
didn't really trust. They would see me as a peer, not
a district official."
Moore also helped the district start and then grow
its family-liaison program. The program began with
two liaisons and has since expanded to include one in
all of the district's 23 elementary schools.
Moore supervises the liaisons and helps make sure
that the work they do with families matches up with
the district's priorities, including a push to look beyond academics in addressing students' needs. She's
trained them to comb through data and flag names
of children that could develop attendance problems.
Liaisons also help engage and build relationships
with families through regular school events.
Moore organizes trainings for the liaisons, including a recent one on social and emotional learning.
She also advocates for them with other district leaders, keeping them informed and trained, and making
sure they can have a districtwide impact.
"She's the mastermind behind all of this," says
Elizabeth Bagnell, a longtime liaison. "She has our

Education Week - February 22, 2017

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