School counselor leadership in school-family-community partnerships: An equity-focused partnership process model for moving the field forward

Owing to the unique skill set of school counselors, they are often at the forefront of forming school-family-community partnerships. This chapter summarizes the main themes, recommendations, and some partnership and family engagement models that have appeared in the school counseling literature on partnerships during the past 20 years. It presents a partnership process model that is informed by previous partnership models, but uses an equity and social justice lens that integrates the recommended practices in the school counseling literature, and provides a road map for school counselors and other practitioners wishing to implement school-family-community partnerships. Finally, the chapter briefly examines some implications of the equity-focused partnership process model. The equity-focused partnership process model provides critical questions and tasks that counselors, school stakeholders, and partnership leadership teams must address at each stage in order to address important aspects of effective, sustainable, culturally congruent partnerships.