Minority and immigrant parents face a number of potential barriers to engagement in their children's education such as poverty, cultural differences, lack of English fluency, limited education, and structural barriers within schools. Community schools seek to address such barriers by linking families and students with needed programs and services and changing the context of the school.

The aim of this study was to describe parental awareness and participation in adult oriented community school programs. This study further sought to examine the relationship between parent participation in community school programming and parent involvement in the child's education in the context of a hypothesized theoretical model using structural equation modeling. Participants included 248 parents of K-8^th grade students at a large, predominately Latino, community school in Chicago that offered 13 programs for parents and adults in the community. Programs included G.E.D. classes, weekly conversations with the principal, and guitar lessons.

Results indicated that 94% of parent respondents were aware of and 71% had participated in at least one program. Interestingly, the highest rates of participation were in programs that directly supported student education. As hypothesized, parent participation in community school programming was positively linked with parent involvement in the child's education. The relationship between participation in programming and involvement in the child's education was mediated by parents' perceptions of their knowledge and skills for involvement (e.g., knowing how to help with school work and communicate with teachers). Parents' perceptions of their knowledge and skills for involvement were also predicted by parents' level of education and their perceptions of the school's efforts to involve them. English competence partially accounted for this positive relationship between parents' knowledge and skills for involvement and their education level.

Support of this model contributes to an understanding of how a community school can create a context for successfully engaging Latino parents in programming that promotes parents' development, enabling them to be more involved in their children's education, and lays a foundation for future research examining how such engagement in community schooling can directly promote parent involvement.