Beyond the Final Bell: What’s Next at Home Works
School’s out and the summer season is officially underway! What a year it’s been. We’ve seen increased engagement across our current school partners and expanded our reach to additional schools across Missouri, including our first full year at Pilot Grove and a successful spring launch at Confluence Academies - South City.
This is a busy (and exciting!) time for the Home Works team. As we wrap up the 2025-26 school year, we’re taking a deeper look at our outcomes and reflecting on what we’ve learned.
Want a quick look at this year’s impact? Watch our 2025-26 Outcomes Highlight Video below.
We’re especially eager to share more detailed impact data in late summer/early fall once standardized assessment results and attendance records are in hand, allowing us to pair those insights with the program outputs we’ve already collected.
While we reflect on the past year, we’re also focused on the future - starting with the 2026-27 school year. Throughout the summer, we’re using planning sessions to apply this year’s learnings, strengthen our program, and ensure we’re bringing fresh family engagement content to teachers this fall. A special thank you to Diana Suarez of Coaction Collective for her thoughtful partnership and the expertise she brings to our team through her many years of experience in the family engagement space.
One initiative we’re especially excited to launch this summer is our three-year strategic plan, developed in collaboration with Goshen Education Consulting. As part of this process, we conducted anonymous community listening sessions with the people who know our work best including teachers, families, administrators, staff, volunteers, and Board members. Their feedback helped to ensure that our priorities for this next chapter at Home Works remain aligned with community needs and opportunities.
What we heard was both encouraging and affirming. Community stakeholders consistently highlighted the core elements of our model - Family Dinners, Family Learning Workshops, Home Visits, and Teacher Training - as critical supports that strengthen connections between school and home and contribute to positive student outcomes. One teacher even shared, “I really, truly love going to the homes and visiting the families. I know that is a big trust issue for the parents to open up with. I have been to homes where we have sat on the floor because there was no furniture, but the family still invited us in. I feel like those relationships formed are stronger than any others.” This is what we’re all about - building the capacity and framework for these relationships to form so that students ultimately benefit.
As we look to expand our reach and deepen our impact, we’ve identified three strategic priorities that will guide our work:
Deepening Impact - strengthen our model through clear core practices, stronger internal systems, and deeper teacher-family partnerships, family leadership, and student belonging
Strengthening Internal Operations- improve implementation consistency by enhancing staff support, training, communication, systems, and accountability practices across partner schools
Intentional Program Expansion - refine and sustain our model while strategically expanding to aligned schools and districts without compromising quality, relationships, or long-term sustainability
Every action you see from us over the next year will be designed to advance one or more of these priorities.
Having been onboard with Home Works for just over 14 months, I’m incredibly proud of this team and the growth mindset our staff and Board continue to bring to this work. We look forward to sharing more with you this fall, including updates on new school partnerships we’re launching and our final 2025-26 school year impact results.
In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to me if you would like to learn more about anything I’ve shared above or if other questions come to mind.
In partnership,
Ashli Florek
Home Works CEO
P.S. If you missed it, we’ve also been sharing our Teacher of the Year spotlight series on social media over the past few weeks - highlighting several of the educators who helped make this year’s work possible. You can read more here: Celebrating Our 2025-26 Teachers of the Year
