School Community Councils

Learn about and join your School Community Council

How Can You Get Involved? 

Reach out to your school’s principal about becoming a member of a School Community Council (SCC). If the council elections have not taken place yet, there is still time for you to join. If elections have already occurred, get to know the parents on the council and email them. Your school’s website will have a tab for SCC (it’s required for all schools in Utah), where you can find council bylaws, council member contact information, and minutes of council meetings. 

Background:

SCCs are unique to Utah and are designed to do the following: 

• Plan for school improvement through collaboration between parents, educators, administrators, and the local school board
• Make funding recommendations to improve areas of critical academic need at the school level
• Increase parent involvement in school-wide decision-making, ensuring the parent point of view is represented. 

Each council will be chaired by a parent and will consist of elected parents and educators. The council is required to have parents in the majority to help establish and improve parent engagement in site-based decision-making.   

Parents influence the school through participation in school community councils. As part of the site-based SCC, parents have the opportunity to: work to reflect the diversity in your school community, communicate and celebrate success, support other parents and new council members, coordinate the work between the council and school parent organization, work with the parent organization, school administration, school faculty, and district leadership to coordinate programs and implementation for better results, gather and share the perspectives of other parents in the community, establish and build relationships between parents and school administration/employees, encourage other parents to participate in the work of councils through creating subcommittees and task forces that use the skills of other parents in the school that may not be current council members, recruit other great parents to run in the annual school-wide council member elections. 

Learn more at: https://schools.utah.gov/schoollandtrust and Utah Code 53G-7-1206.