This cookbook is the result of the Massachusetts Wraparound Zone Initiative, an initiative aimed at helping schools tackle both academic and non-academic barriers to student learning, and includes recipes for strengthening school culture, creating strong student success teams, engaging family members as partners, building community partnerships and coalitions, and much more.

This module provides users with an interactive learning experience so that they can learn what they need to know about the special education process. While this guide is geared towards families, it will be useful to anyone who needs to know more about topics like referral, evaluation and eligibility (among others).

Access session materials from the 2018 LEA event on topics including creating a pipeline of diverse educators, developing multi-tiered systems of support, equitable access to high quality curriculum, bilingual education, ensuring racial and cultural equity, effectively engaging families, student mobility, approaches to addressing students’ mental health needs, integrating social emotional and academic learning, and more.

DESE’s October 2019 Leading with Access & Equity Conference had a great line-up of sessions! Access all conference materials here.

The School Climate Survey Suite is a set of four multidimensional surveys to measure student, teacher, administrator, faculty, and family perceptions of school climate. The surveys are brief, reliable, and valid for assessing perceived school climate among students in Grades 3-12. The manual was updated 2022 (Version 2).

Family-friendly guides to learning standards for each grade level, designed to structure and strengthen school-family partnerships.

MA DESE conducted research on successful partnerships, including schools with turnaround efforts supported by one or more partner. The interviews, focus groups, and research led to the conclusion that there are necessary conditions at the outset of a partnership, and habits throughout the partnership, that make the difference between successful and unsuccessful relationships. This guidance aims to provide clarity around the necessary conditions, as well as a set of tools for districts and partners.

Listen to staff and leadership from schools tell their unique school improvement stories in this video collection, originally created to spotlight successful school turnaround practices. Topics include school culture, data practices, instructional improvement, career pathways, MTSS, family engagement, and more.

Based in existing research and best-practices, this guide provides a compass for the development of family engagement strategies, policies, and programs using a "dual capacity" approach that recognizes the roles and needs of both partners - parents and staff. For those doing family engagement work, this is one of the main go-to frameworks for thinking about this work.

Learn how to shift from traditional parent-teacher open house and curriculum nights to teacher-facilitated sessions designed to help parents support their child's academic success:  Academic Parent-Teacher Teams (APTT).