The Family Voice Session at My Kids’ School

I host a family voice group from my kids’ school, and we just ran a session that gave me something I want to write down before the next one. The school serves kids in grades three through eight who are gifted or have intellectual abilities. The parents had requested hearing from alumni about what it was like to leave the school and go off to other things, so I assembled a panel of graduates, both from high school and college, to talk to them.

What we kept hearing was that grades two through eight at the school were harder than anything after they left and moved on to high school and even college!

The request

Parents of kids in a school like this carry a particular kind of question. The school is doing something specific for their child right now, and they want to know what happens on the other side. They asked for alumni voices because they wanted the answer from people who had lived it, not from staff or administrators.

So we brought graduates back. Some had finished high school elsewhere. Some were in college. The point was to let parents hear directly from people who had been the kid in the seat their kid is in now.

The framework behind the questions

The way I organized the questions was based on Portrait of a Thriving Youth, which is another project I work on. It’s about what thriving looks like, specifically for middle grade adolescents and their caregivers.

Using that framework meant the panel wasn’t just an open-ended Q&A. The questions were structured around what we already know matters in youth development, which kept the conversation from drifting into anecdotes and gave parents something they could actually take with them.

What the alumni said

A lot of the alumni were saying school was harder in grades two through eight than it was after they left. That was the thing the parents had asked to hear about, and it was the thing the panel kept coming back to.

It’s a counterintuitive message for a parent to receive in the middle of those grades. The years that feel hardest from the inside are, according to the people on the other side of them, the hardest part. That reframes a lot of what a parent is doing day to day during that stretch.

Why this format

A panel of alumni isn’t a workshop. It isn’t a speaker. It’s people who went through the experience telling people in the middle of it what it was like. The family voice group exists to make those exchanges happen.

We have another session coming up, this time featuring teachers at the school sharing their perspectives on gifted students. The first one worked because the parents had named what they wanted, the alumni had something specific to say, and the questions were organized around a framework that gave the conversation shape.

If you’re working on family engagement at a school, focusing on the middle grades or interested specifically in gifted learners, and want to talk about how to structure sessions like this, I’d love to connect.