Building Belonging with Multilingual Families

What does it take for a student to feel that they truly belong at school? A welcoming classroom matters. A caring teacher matters. But belonging also grows when students see their families reflected, respected, and welcomed as essential members of the school community. For multilingual families, meaningful engagement begins when schools move beyond simply translating information and instead create genuine opportunities for families to participate, lead, and shape their children’s education.

Research increasingly shows that family engagement is closely connected to student success. A 2022 synthetic analysis of 28 empirical studies on English learners found that family involvement was associated with academic, behavioral, and social-emotional outcomes. Other research has found that stronger school support can encourage greater parental involvement among English learners, which in turn is associated with fewer social-emotional concerns and stronger academic outcomes. These findings point to an important shift: multilingual families should not be viewed primarily through the lens of the barriers they face, but as partners whose knowledge, experiences, languages, and advocacy can strengthen their children's education.

Language access is a particularly important part of that partnership. When schools communicate with families in languages they understand and create space for families to use their home languages, they make participation more accessible—and signal that families' identities and experiences belong in the school community. Recent research on multilingual migrant families similarly emphasizes the value of activating home languages in schools and challenging assumptions that language differences limit families' capacity to participate. Research also connects family engagement practices with attendance and early learning outcomes for English learners, underscoring how meaningful communication between educators and families can support students from the earliest years of school.

Building belonging, then, means asking more than whether families received a translated newsletter. Are families invited to share their perspectives? Do they have meaningful opportunities to participate in school leadership? Can they advocate for their children with confidence? Tadaca's Parent Leadership Academy approaches family engagement through this broader lens, combining bilingual leadership development, advocacy, school-community collaboration, and ESL instruction to help multilingual families become active partners in their children's education. When schools invest in those relationships, they strengthen more than communication between home and school— they build a community where students can see that their families, languages, and experiences are valued. And when families feel they belong, students have one more reason to believe that they do, too.