Creating strong partnerships to support single parent families: a collaboration between schools, community and single parent families

School reform and poverty alleviation initiatives must include parents and communities as active partners. Current efforts made are insufficient and do not actively engage all families particularly single parent families who face unique challenges. Through a predominantly qualitative study, this research investigated how to better support single parent families of city A. It emphasized the importance of collaboration between school A, the community and single parent families jointly to improve student achievement and begin to close the achievement gap. Research findings and recommendations are presented through the framework of research conducted by Pedro Noguera (2004) that emphasized the importance of parent empowerment.