TY - JOUR TI - School-university-community partnerships: promises and challenges of a parent engagement program DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-acar-pb75 PY - 2020 AB - Parent participation in urban schools is essential to student success. In historically low-income communities, parents are often expected to participate in parental involvement activities aligned with middle-class norms instead of participating in parent engagement activities that welcome parents into the school communities. This study sought to better understand the experiences, promises, and challenges that educational stakeholders faced in a newly formed asset-based partnership connecting a school, a community, and a university to increase parent engagement. A qualitative inquiry methodology was used to explore a parent engagement program at a low-income hyper-segregated African American urban school located in a Northeastern metropolitan city. Participants were community residents who were unemployed or underemployed prior to participating in the program, teachers, school-based support staff members, school administrators, and a program administrator from a local university. This study employed Bourdieu’s Social Capital Theory to understand the experiences of members of the school community and incorporated focus group interviews, document analysis, and individual interviews. The following themes emerged: mistrust between Parent Leadership Program (PLP) members and school officials, constant program changes, gaps in expectations between program participants and staff, increased social capital and leadership skills for parents, as well as positive relationships between cooperating teachers and parents. This qualitative study is significant because it provides a multidimensional understanding of parental engagement as it looks at and examines various stakeholders’ experiences within a low-income hyper-segregated African American school and describes how stakeholders made sense of their experiences in the PLP. The significance of this qualitative study lies in the fact that it seeks to reinforce a multidimensional understanding of parental engagement through the examination and inclusion of various stakeholders' experiences within a low-income hyper-segregated African American school and goes on to further describe how stakeholders made sense of their experiences in the PLP. KW - Urban Systems LA - English ER -