Belonging is a must have in schools, not a nice to have.
That’s the mindset educators should adopt when cultivating a sense of belonging for students, families, and staff alike, according to Ty Harris, the director of the office for opportunity and achievement at the Virginia Beach City public schools, and Miranda Scully, the director of family and community engagement at the Fayette County public schools in Lexington, Ky.
Harris and Scully, both 2025 EdWeek Leaders To Learn From, spoke at the EdWeek Leadership Symposium in May about how district leaders can build frameworks to support belonging in their schools.
Here’s a recap of their insights.
Educators’ mindsets shape students’ sense of belonging
Through his career, Harris has seen how educators sometimes treat students’ sense of belonging as an afterthought, especially when they feel they have so many other things to worry about.
“Belonging needs to come before achievement, and we have to be willing to take the steps that we need to take to get us in the right place,” Harris said.
That’s why he and Scully emphasize that cultivating a sense of belonging starts with educator mindset. That mindset must include empathy and a belief in equity and justice, Scully said.
“[It] takes intentional effort to shift our minds, to not look at what students or families don’t have but recognize the assets that they bring to the table and their experiences,” Scully said. “And with that mindset, we start to do things with families and not just for them.”
Use research to launch districts’ belonging frameworks
Once educators are aligned in mindset, districts should create and implement belonging frameworks rooted in research and data, Scully and Harris said.
In Scully’s district, educators rely on a dual-capacity building framework developed by Karen Mapp, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who studies parent and family engagement. That framework focuses on how to build both families’ and school staff’s capacities for engagement.
Scully also sets clear organizational conditions for success: Family- and community-engagement work must be integrated throughout the whole district, and district leaders must provide sustainable resources to support the work.
Scully defines the district’s family and community engagement in three parts: meeting students’ and families’ basic needs; helping families understand the academic standards their children must meet and helping them navigate the education system; and training educators to better support family engagement.
In Harris’ district, a belonging framework for cultivating the feeling emerged out of in-house data.
Climate and culture surveys, part of the district’s preexisting social-emotional-learning framework, showed that secondary students didn’t feel as strong a sense of belonging as school leaders hoped.
His office responded by directly asking students for feedback: what they were thinking, what they needed, and how they wanted to be involved. This led to the creation of the TIDE coalition (Togetherness through Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity), a student-volunteer group whose input helped shape the district’s belonging framework.
“Take a deep dive into what’s working in your division, what’s not working. Where are your gaps? Where are your blind spots?” Harris said.
Intentional work, communication help educators overcome challenges
Once districts begin the work of cultivating belonging, Harris and Scully emphasized the importance of measuring success in multiple ways.
If using surveys, educators should closely examine the questions asked to ensure they’re capturing meaningful data, Harris said.
Districts can also track quantitative measures, such as club participation, improved attendance, or decreased behavior incidents.
But sometimes, success is felt more than measured, Harris and Scully said. For instance, Scully encourages her team to prioritize how families experience events over attendance numbers alone.
“Sometimes, we get caught up on the data piece of it, and I just always like to remind people that it’s an ongoing journey,” Scully said.
Both leaders stressed the importance of communicating any measures of success in cultivating a sense of belonging, especially when facing local pushback to belonging initiatives.
“Make sure that everybody knows what you’re finding and what you’re doing to address it and bring them along to be a part of that process, because there are folks out there who are pushing against something just because they don’t know anything about it,” Harris said.
