Students, families and staff all must have a sense of belonging in the education process – it’s a necessity, not something nice to have, according to Ty Harris and Miranda Scully, both 2025 EdWeek Leaders To Learn From. Harris is the director of the office for opportunity and achievement at the Virginia Beach City public schools, and Scully is the director of family and community engagement at the Fayette County public schools in Lexington, Ky.
Here are three keys to how district leaders can build frameworks to support belonging in their schools, according to Harris and Scully.
1) Mindsets shape belonging
Harris has seen how educators sometimes treat students’ sense of belonging as an afterthought, especially when they have so many other issues to address.
“Belonging needs to come before achievement, and we have to be willing to take the steps that we need to take to get us in the right place,” Harris says.
Cultivating a sense of belonging starts with the educator’s mindset, Harris and Scully contend. And that mindset must include empathy and a belief in equity and justice.
“[It] takes intentional effort to shift our minds, to not look at what students or families don’t have but recognize the assets that they bring to the table and their experiences,” Scully says. “And with that mindset, we start to do things with families and not just for them.”
2) Research can launch belonging frameworks
After developing the right mindset, districts should create and implement belonging frameworks that are rooted in research and data, Scully and Harris say.
Educators in Scully’s district rely on a dual-capacity building framework developed by Karen Mapp, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who studies parent and family engagement. The framework focuses on how to build both families’ and school staff’s capacities for engagement.
Setting clear organizational conditions for successful belonging frameworks is critical, says Scully. Family- and community-engagement work must be integrated throughout the whole district, and district leaders must provide sustainable resources to support the work.
Scully’s district defines family and community engagement in three parts: 1) meeting students’ and families’ basic needs; 2) helping families understand the academic standards their children must meet and helping them navigate the education system; and 3) training educators to better support family engagement.
In Harris’s district, a framework for cultivating the feeling of belonging emerged from climate and culture surveys. These surveys, part of the district’s preexisting social-emotional-learning framework, indicated secondary students didn’t feel as strong a sense of belonging as school leaders intended.
In response, students were asked for feedback. What they were thinking if they didn’t feel a strong sense of belonging? What did they need? How did they want to be involved? This led to creating a student-volunteer group whose input helped shape the district’s belonging framework.
“Take a deep dive into what’s working in your division, what’s not working. Where are your gaps? Where are your blind spots?” Harris says.
3) Measure feelings of belonging
Harris and Scully emphasize the importance of measuring the effectiveness of cultivating feelings of belonging.
Educators using surveys should closely examine the questions asked to ensure they’re capturing meaningful data, Harris says.
Quantitative measures can be tracked, such as club participation, improved attendance, or decreased behavior incidents.
Don’t ignore feelings while studying data. Scully encourages her team to prioritize how families experience school-related events more than attendance numbers to get a sense of their feeling of belonging.
Both leaders stress how important it is to communicate successes that come from cultivating a sense of belonging, especially if there is local pushback to belonging initiatives.
“Make sure that everybody knows what you’re finding and what you’re doing to address it and bring them along to be a part of that process, because there are folks out there who are pushing against something just because they don’t know anything about it,” Harris says.
Education Week
