On any given day in Lexington, Ky., families may be taking their children for a free haircut in town, courtesy of a voucher provided by local barbers and distributed by the Fayette County public school district.
Immigrant families may attend an information session explaining how grading works in their home language. And teachers may be getting trained on how to actively listen to parents.
All this exists in large part thanks to Miranda Scully, the district’s director of family and community engagement.
Since stepping into the role in 2016, Scully has reshaped how her racially diverse, 42,000-student district approaches family outreach, making it more systemic and grounding it in research. She sees engagement as less a box to check off and more a strategy to meet such goals as improving student attendance, academic performance, and college readiness.
“It’s not just a one-off. It’s not just a program,” Scully, a 2025 EdWeek Leaders To Learn From honoree, said. “Family engagement has to be embedded, just like curriculum and instruction.”
It’s a mindset to engagement work that districts across the country are embracing, following the coronavirus pandemic as more parents seek to get involved in public education.
“Sometimes with family engagement, people will say they’re doing it, but it ends up being siloed and boxed off,” Scully said. “So we’ve been very intentional around leading the work of family engagement but not owning the work of family engagement.”
Ownership, instead, falls to the entire district, including the families themselves, she said.
District leaders aren’t solely responsible for effective engagement
Scully, 44, wants parents in her Kentucky district, where half of all students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, to understand what their child should know academically at every grade level, how they can support students’ social-emotional development, and wade through postsecondary options.
Those are challenges she saw her own parents struggle to navigate.
“My parents didn’t know how to get us where they wanted us to be,” Scully said. “But they were very intentional about pushing that there’s more out there.”
Scully and her four siblings, raised in Kentucky, all became first-generation college graduates. She credits this to her parents putting them in a school environment where her family’s tenuous economic situation didn’t determine academic expectations. School staff ensured money was never an obstacle to accessing extracurricular activities and sports. She also had community support through programs like the Boys and Girls Club.
Prior to her work in the Fayette County schools, Scully dove into community and academic support: as a social worker helping families advocate for their children; a specialist at a community college assisting first-generation students in navigating postsecondary plans; an academic counselor at the University of Kentucky; and a state-level staffer engaged in coalition work around education with the commission for higher education in Indiana.
When she returned to Kentucky in 2016, she began as the sole worker in her department in the Lexington district, which is often the case for family- and community-engagement roles across the country. But district leaders shared her vision for what the work could look like.
Now, thanks in part to redirected federal funding and grant money, Scully oversees a team of 13, each specializing in either a grade band or service such as academic programming or special education. Her team’s expansion was a priority of her then-superintendent, Scully said, as he valued the role family engagement played in meeting broader district goals.
But even with the higher-ups’ support to hire a full team, Scully didn’t want her department to be exclusively responsible for engagement work.
She draws on the work of Karen Mapp, a professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who emphasizes supporting parent engagement at both the district and classroom levels, to create a family-outreach network that stretches far beyond the central office.
When Scully first took the job, the district’s teachers were skilled at supporting students academically and social-emotionally inside the classroom. But few had training on how to engage families.
Scully sought to change that trajectory early on, by leading year-round professional development for teachers around family and community engagement, in partnership with the National Center of Family Learning, a national nonprofit headquartered in Kentucky focusing on family engagement, literacy, and leadership.
That systematic approach is exemplary—and rare, experts say.
“It’s one thing to have a school system [that] just says we’re going to provide professional learning for all these teachers and just kind of throws it out and makes it a menu option where teachers can do it or can choose not to do it,” said Cherry Boyles, the senior director of community impact for the center. “But what Miranda did was design this tiered system where she wanted to start with the leaders and create this team of leaders who would be trained in this work and who would know it intimately.”
The district now boasts 72 staff members, principals, district administrators, teachers, paraprofessionals, counselors, and mental health specialists who volunteer as family- and community-engagement champions in their respective schools after completing training. They help coordinate and implement engagement programs at various school sites and assist in training their colleagues.
It’s become a self-sustaining system in which individual schools and district leaders alike are able to tailor the strategies that work for their given area. For instance, teachers who Scully and her team have trained may work with colleagues on the best ways to assist parents in staying up to date on their child’s academic progress.
“When you have a supportive team, a supportive leader, the resources, and you also have the skill and the capacity and the knowledge of how to do it the right way, I’ve seen things really move tremendously, sometimes in a short period of time, if you’ve got the real backing of the leadership,” said Harvard’s Mapp.
At the district level, Scully and her team host a family university. What started as an annual one-day conference full of informational sessions for caregivers and families and enrichment activities for students is now that plus a series of biweekly sessions covering a variety of topics including early childhood programming and special education. Scully even secured a partnership with the Urban League of Lexington-Fayette to grow outreach with local Black families.
The district, where nearly 1 in 5 students is an English learner, also provides a six- to eight-week bilingual Latino family literacy program. The district runs one at a family-connection hub, which is one of three repurposed city and district buildings that now host a variety of family engagement events. Scully’s team also supports individual schools that want to host their own Latino family literacy programs on site. About 20 to 30 families participate in the program at the hub.
The curriculum covers topics such as how to create a reading routine at home and features such activities as weekly prompts around families’ hopes and dreams for their children that all go into a family album by the end of the program.
The engagement work also supports more basic needs of families in the district.
Scully’s team coordinates with local barbers and stylists and barber schools to offer about 200 vouchers a month for haircuts to families across the city. But her team went further, supporting a lead middle school in opening a year-round barbershop on campus that doubles as a space for kids to get haircuts and a space where barbers are trained on social-emotional support for these students.
“One size doesn’t fit all. We are giving access and opportunity for families,” Scully said.
Challenges, opportunities for effective engagement remain
All this work has paid off in practical ways.
Fayette County’s deputy superintendent, Houston Barber, credits Scully’s leadership with playing a role in student attendance going up by 0.6-0.7 percentage points between school year 2022-23 and 2023-24.
According to state data, back in 2021-22 the district’s chronic absenteeism was higher than the state average. In 2023-24 it fell below the state average at a time when chronic absenteeism remains one of schools’ toughest challenges. The district has also seen its graduation rates tick up by 3.5 percent since 2021.
And over the last several years, the district saw all of its schools previously flagged as among the lowest performers in the state climb out of that status.
Barber also credits Scully’s work with schools for engaging with families they hadn’t before. In fact, the district has seen participation in its annual family survey-response rate nearly double over the last few years.
Scully has encouraged school leaders to be intentional with outreach for family feedback and to be simultaneously transparent and not overpromise when responding to feedback. School leaders, for instance, now offer sessions after annual family surveys are completed where families can elaborate on their feedback and leaders can spell out what they can and cannot do.
“She has really opened the doors of what education should look like and be and she’s a model leader of what leadership looks like in the future,” Barber said.
Yet, Scully still sees room to grow and fine-tune the engagement work, in part by boosting the capacity of community leaders who support different student groups across the district.
And she keeps reminding her team and educators not to focus too much on participation numbers but rather on the quality of engagement they see among participants. People tend to focus too much on participation numbers as a measure of successful engagement, especially when trying to start something new or reimagine programs, Scully said.
She also encourages the district’s educators to embrace the mindset that all families want their children to succeed yet not all families have historically had great experiences engaging with schools.
“I’ve not found one culture that does not value education,” Scully said.
That may look different from one group to another.
“But the value is always there,” she said.
