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Nourishing a Strong School Culture with Sustainable Family Partnerships
Thursday, August 28, 2025 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm EDT
Presented by Kate Pechacek, Former Teacher, Current K12 Strategic Advisor, TalkingPoints
Moderated by Heather Dooley, Senior Director of Brand Marketing and Communications, TalkingPoints
Sponsored by TalkingPoints
Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.
The first weeks of school don’t just launch the year—they set the table for everything that follows. For district and site leaders, this is a prime window to establish the relationships that nourish a culture of trust, partnership, and progress. Whether it’s recognized or not, families have always been a key ingredient in strong school culture—and the best time to start building those partnerships is now.
In this hands-on edWebinar, you get practical tools to help you serve up sustainable family engagement systems from the very start of the year—both in and around the classroom.
In the classroom:
- Establish daily teacher-family communication rhythms
- Build trust and connection
- Partner with families to support learning
Around the classroom:
- Design systems with families that reinforce classroom success
- Co-create a culture of stability and well-being
- Align engagement strategies to student outcome goals
Whether you’re still plating your back-to-school plans or already mid-bite, this session helps you build a solid cultural foundation that will feed student success all year long. This recorded edWebinar is of interest to K-12 teachers, school leaders, district leaders, and education technology leaders.
About the Presenter
Kate Pechacek currently serves as K12 Strategic Advisor to systems-improving edtech organizations and school districts, including TalkingPoints, and is the founder and CEO of OpendoorsEd. Prior to founding OpendoorsEd, Kate served as Head of Impact at TalkingPoints, one of several roles she has held in education technology over the last nine years. She began her nearly 30-year career in education as a secondary math teacher. In addition to 15 years as a teacher, Kate has served in districts nationwide, holding multiple site and district leadership roles in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and MTSS. She is passionate about ensuring equity, disrupting predictability, and narrowing opportunity gaps.
About the Moderator
Heather Dooley is the Senior Director of Brand Marketing and Communications at TalkingPoints. She is driven by a deep belief in the power of education to help students realize their full potential and contribute to thriving, healthy communities. As a public school parent in a diverse district, Heather has seen firsthand the critical role that access, inclusion, and strong school-family partnerships play in student success. Her experience fuels her commitment to fostering meaningful connections between families and schools. Heather brings a strong background in digital marketing, with nearly a decade dedicated to the nonprofit education sector. Her work has focused on advancing effective school practices and empowering families with the information they need to support learning at home and in their communities.
Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.
Join the Community & Family Engagement community to network with educators, participate in online discussions, receive invitations to upcoming edWebinars, and view recordings of previous programs to earn CE certificates.
TalkingPoints is an edtech nonprofit dedicated to driving student success by unlocking the power of effective family-school partnerships. TalkingPoints’ communications and family engagement platform provides capacity-building guidance, time-saving tools, and universally accessible, two-way, text-first communication in more than 150 languages. This unique approach removes barriers like language, time, mindset, and capacity, fostering positive and purposeful family engagement. Unlike traditional communication tools, TalkingPoints is purpose-built to improve student outcomes by guiding partnership efforts toward the practices that matter most for student success. The platform empowers educators at every level—from district leaders to classroom teachers—to engage every family, in their home language, through barrier-free, multilingual communication.
