Here’s a thought experiment: imagine you’re sitting in your school’s site-based committee meeting. Someone has printed an agenda. There are bottled waters. The same five people are talking. The same three people are checking their phones.
Sound familiar?
Most schools have some version of this — a site-based committee or school site council, staffed by well-meaning staff, families, and community members who’ve been asked to serve in an advisory role. The intent is right. The legal requirement is real. But somewhere between the policy and the practice, something goes flat. The problem isn’t the people. It’s the model. We keep convening stakeholders the same way we did in the 1990s and then wondering why engagement feels obligatory instead of energizing.
What if we changed that?
Author Priya Parker makes a deceptively simple argument: the first step in convening people meaningfully is committing to a bold, sharp focus. Not a topic. Not an agenda. A purpose. Most committee meetings are built around information delivery like updates, reports, and check-boxes. But information delivery isn’t a purpose. It doesn’t ask anything of the people in the room. It doesn’t unlock their insight or their investment.
There's a meaningful distinction between a committee and a community worth sitting with:
A committee is a structure. It exists to fulfill a function – usually to advise, review, or approve.
A community is a relationship. It exists because people are connected by something they care about — and because they believe their involvement matters.
When we treat stakeholder engagement as a compliance requirement, we get committees. When we treat it as a genuine opportunity to tap into the wisdom of the people closest to our students, we get something much more powerful.
Before we can engage people meaningfully, we have to understand who we’re engaging. And today’s school communities are more generationally diverse than at any other point in recent history. The families, staff, and community members in your building span five generations – each shaped by different world events, different formative experiences, and very different relationships with technology and institutions. Here’s the challenge: a meeting format designed for one generation is almost certainly failing another. The Boomer who finds meaning in a structured, in-person conversation may be sitting next to a Millennial who would have engaged far more deeply through an asynchronous collaborative document – and a Gen Z who checked out the moment the meeting opened without a clear goal.
This isn’t a personality problem. It’s a design problem. When we run one-size-fits-all committee meetings, we’re implicitly designing for a narrow slice of our community and leaving everyone else to either comply or disengage. The families who don’t show up to evening meetings aren’t necessarily disengaged; they may be working night shifts, navigating childcare, or simply not finding the format worth their time.
Meaningful engagement means asking: Who is our community, really? What do they value? How do they communicate? What does participation look like for them — not for us?
Consider what each generation actually needs to feel like a valued contributor:
- Boomers need relationship and context. They want to know why they’re being asked, and they want to know that their experience is being honored — not just tolerated.
- Gen X needs efficiency and honesty. Get to the point, show the data, and don’t waste their time on process theater.
- Millennials need purpose and feedback loops. Tell them how their input was used. Close the loop. Demonstrate that participation produces results.
- Gen Z needs authenticity and relevance. Connect the work to something real. Let them lead something, not just attend something.
- Gen Alpha’s parents — still mostly Millennials — need flexibility and digital access. They’re not less invested; they’re just navigating a different kind of busy.
What the generational landscape tells us is that no single format or communication style can serve everyone well. And that’s actually liberating because it gives us permission to stop trying. Instead of one large committee that meets monthly and tries to do everything, schools can build smaller, intentional communities each focused on a specific purpose, with the right people in the room, in a format that actually works for them. A data review group might look very different from a student voice circle. A family engagement team might meet at times and in places that a leadership alignment conversation wouldn’t. The point isn’t uniformity. The point is matching the structure to the people and the purpose. When engagement is designed with generational diversity in mind, something shifts. People stop feeling like they’re attending a meeting. They start feeling like they’re contributing to something.
There’s a tendency in school improvement work to think about stakeholder engagement as something schools do for compliance like a box to check before getting to the “real” work. But the schools that make the most sustainable progress know something different: their stakeholders are the real work. The grandparent raising a grandchild who shows up to every family event because someone thought to schedule it at 10am on a Tuesday. The Gen Z teacher who stays late to co-design something with students because they were actually asked. The Millennial parent who becomes your most vocal advocate because you told them how their feedback changed a decision. Engagement deepens when schools are intentional not just about who they involve, but how. And generational diversity isn’t a complication. It’s a resource.
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