Listening, Supporting, Engaging: Addressing Food Insecurity to Strengthen Family Engagement
Family engagement is fundamental to student success, often linked to higher academic achievement, better attendance, and stronger social-emotional skills. However, traditional approaches to family engagement, like counting attendance at PTA meetings or school events, often overlook the everyday barriers that many families face, especially in communities experiencing economic hardship.
Recognizing this disconnect, Erika Larsen, a Cohort 15 Fellow at Passaic Public Schools, set out to truly understand what was keeping families from fully engaging with their children's education. Through a comprehensive data-driven analysis paired with knowledge from frontline staff, Erika spearheaded efforts to identify what was getting in the way of family involvement, revealing that food insecurity was a major obstacle to creating meaningful, trusting partnerships between families and schools.
Redefining the Roles in Family Engagement
Passaic Public Schools serves a diverse and dynamic community in Passaic, New Jersey, with 13,980 students enrolled across 16 schools. The district is home to many recent immigrants, and more than half of the students are current or former multilingual learners. In an effort to truly understand the challenges that families face, the district undertook a comprehensive, mixed-methods root-cause analysis that uncovered several key realities:
- Time poverty and work schedules: Most families in Passaic work long or irregular hours with many working multiple jobs just to make ends meet. These schedules leave close to no room for families to participate in school events, even if they want to.
- Food insecurity: Passaic has the second-largest food-insecure population among nearly 600 New Jersey zip codes.
- Structural barriers: Low attendance at school events doesn’t reflect disinterest or disengagement. Most parents are deeply invested in their children’s success and support in ways that would not show up in attendance sheets or surveys.
- Community context: Nearly half of Passaic residents were born abroad and 94% of students identify as Hispanic, underscoring the importance of culturally and linguistically responsive approaches rather than a “one-size-fits-all” model.
Once this analysis was complete, Erika shared the findings with key district stakeholders, including the Superintendent, Assistant Superintendent, Parent Liaisons, and Paraprofessionals. She facilitated collaborative sessions to present the results and to tap into the expertise and firsthand insights of those working directly with the families each day. As Erika noted, “Quantitative data can’t tell the story alone - there is no substitute for listening to community members.”
By combining rigorous data analysis with the lived experiences of frontline staff and the families they engage with, the district developed a more holistic understanding of what families truly need to engage. This process made it clear: to foster greater family engagement, the district first had to help families meet their most basic needs.
Leveraging a Minimum Viable Intervention that Works
Recognizing that families can’t fully engage when basic needs go unmet, Passaic Public Schools formed a partnership with the Community Food Bank of New Jersey to directly tackle food insecurity.
Erika crafted a minimum viable intervention which allowed her to test the approach before expanding. With the help of frontline staff, the district identified a select set of families in need who would receive 20-pound boxes of pantry essentials and fresh produce twice monthly. This intervention prioritized real-time input and adjustments, allowing for improvements to be made before expanding, and creating a cycle of continuous improvement.
In just one year, the food pantry program grew from a small pilot to a district-wide initiative serving 220 families and 488 children. By June 2025, it had distributed over 38,000 pounds of food, enough for more than 31,000 meals.
But numbers tell only part of the story. The regular food distributions became organic opportunities for school staff to connect with families—answering questions, offering support, and building relationships outside the structure of formal events. “At first it was getting to know folks, but then by the end, people were really warm with us,” Erika said, “It was a great way to have a consistent touchpoint and build community as well.”
As one family wrote in a program survey:
“Knowing that we have the help, support, and collaboration of the school, we don’t feel alone.”
Staff noticed a meaningful change: parents who first came for food assistance later began joining school workshops or reaching out for extra educational support. This trust-building shift illustrates how meeting basic needs can lay the groundwork for deeper, long-term engagement.
Lessons Learned
Erika’s experience in Passaic Public Schools made it clear that addressing family engagement requires far more than encouraging families to attend events or participate in traditional ways. Instead, the path to authentic engagement begins with listening and developing a nuanced understanding of families’ lived realities.
Genuine engagement is about building ongoing partnerships, not simply tallying up participation or checking off activities. It’s about trust, communication, and respect. When the district shifted its focus from asking why families weren’t involved to asking what families truly needed - relationships deepened, and parents began to feel genuinely seen and supported.
Ultimately, Passaic’s story calls for redefining family engagement in schools everywhere. “We have to push the boundaries of how we think about family engagement and encourage folks to step outside of that idea of just ‘attendance’ as engagement and instead move towards a more inclusive definition.” Erika stated. Meeting essential needs, listening to families’ voices, and fostering trustful relationships can lay the groundwork for the kind of engagement that helps students—and entire communities—thrive.