From its founding in 1853, The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) identified parent leadership and involvement as a win-win strategy and incorporated it as one of its core components. So naturally, when CAS entered into a partnership with the New York City Board of Education in 1990, parents were invited to be central players from the planning phase onward. When CAS’s first community school, Salomé Ureña de Henriquez Middle Academies (Intermediate School [IS] 218), opened in 1992, a red carpet was extended for parents by other parents and the staff; 11 years later it was still extended, not only at this school but also at nine others in Manhattan and the Bronx, as well as at many adaptation sites around the country and abroad. In its work in community schools, CAS sees parents as assets and key allies, not as burdens; we aim not only to increase the number of parents involved in their children’s education but also to deepen the intensity of their involvement and to encourage greater participation in their children’s future. As we engage parents in skills workshops and advocacy events, we also create a critical link to the home, allowing us to serve and empower whole families and to foster effective leadership in their homes as well as their schools. Most of the CAS community schools are located in low-income neighborhoods that have many recent immigrants; the challenges of meeting the numerous needs inherent in immigrant communities are added to the challenges of involving parents. However, after more than a decade, a number of evaluations and reports show that each year these schools see greater numbers of parents participating in events ranging from parenting training and advocacy events to holiday dinners.1 This level of involvement represents a significant change in school culture; these parents are playing a greater role in their children’s education and in the school as a whole. By 2003 leaders from both the New York City Department of Education and the New York State Department of Education, among others, had recognized the parent involvement strategy at CAS’s community schools as a model to be emulated.