Delaware educators and policymakers driving the state?s Race to the Top education initiative have identified a weak spot in the effort to boost student performance: the parent component.
A variety of new local, state, and national efforts are underway to integrate parents more fully into the life and functioning of schools. Far beyond bake sales and booster clubs, the initiatives involve a rethinking of schools? relationship with parents, with an increasing emphasis on providing services to parents themselves to stabilize the home life of students.
?We see parents as one of the three legs of the stool in education, along with students and faculty,? said Kathy Demarest, spokeswoman for New Castle County Vocational-Technical School District. ?Family engagement is absolutely valuable and important at all grade levels.?
Recognition of the role of parents in student performance is making its way into public policy.
?This is the cutting edge in education,? said Marilyn Price-Mitchell, a developmental psychologist and founder of the National Parent Net Association, a parent involvement advocacy organization.
?Many of the districts as part of their district-level Race to the Top plans are incorporating parental engagement activities as part of what they are proposing to do,? Lieutenant Governor Matt Denn said. ?We are very optimistic that we?re going to see more and more of that.?
Initiatives in Congress and in Delaware
In Washington last week U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D) and two cosponsors introduced the Family Engagement in Education Act, a bill that would direct a higher percentage of current Title I education funding to support new standards-based programs for parent involvement in schools.
?It doesn?t require more federal funding. It just prioritizes federal spending. In many districts when there?s budget pressures they?re likely to cut parental engagement funding,? said Sen. Coons. ?If teachers are going to reach and students are going to learn, parents have to be more engaged. Parents are the vital and sometimes missing part of a successful education system for the United States.?
Promoting the importance of parental involvement in education
U.S. Senator Chris Coons
In Delaware, Denn recently honored two schools, the Ralph McIlvaine Early Childhood Center in Magnolia and Anna P. Mote Elementary School in Wilmington, for their parent participation programs. Denn will hold a workshop this week to explore successful models in Delaware and around the country.
?You can?t just turn a switch and change parental involvement,? Denn said. ?Parents are as involved as they want to be, so you have to come up with ways to try to get them more involved.?
?Schools? ability to engage families varies,? said Sharon Griffin, executive director of The Learning Link of Delaware, a nonprofit that advocates and assists in parental engagement in schools. ?A lot of schools are stuck in a traditional way of how they want parents to be involved. But parents can be involved in much deeper ways.?
Price-Mitchell notes that early attempts to engage parents in schools, dating to the 1950s, were motivated by a desire to assimilate immigrants into the dominant culture. Today, programs to involve parents reflect a ?a shift in thinking in how we integrate in a very diverse society?. [It?s] not that you really want to make the immigrant population or low-income people think differently. You want to lift them up and educate them,? she said.
Meeting local parents? needs
How to help and motivate parents varies according to local demographics. According to the Child Trends Databank parent participation in schools nationally varies greatly depending on parents? education, ethnicity, income, and English proficiency, as well as their students? grade and level of achievement.
A number of Delaware programs focus on students? life beyond the classroom. ?Students spend 80 percent of their time outside of school,? said Griffin. ?The better you can help to equip and empower parents, the better [students] are going to do in school.?
Children pack their home lives in their backpacks every day, and problems such as poverty, hunger and dysfunction appear in the classroom in a variety of forms. Research shows that home life problems lead to more classroom disruptions, lower student achievement and a higher drop out rate, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University?s Mailman School of Public Health.
Schools need to show parents why getting involved is so important, Griffin said, and parents must have a voice in how their schools are run. ?Parents are often very frustrated with the system and it comes out in some negative ways.?
Many parents lack the time, energy, and resources to take an active role in their children?s education. Playing an active role takes time, energy and resources that some parents just don?t have. Others have unpleasant memories of school.
?A lot of parents, particularly in schools where kids are struggling in a higher percentage ? didn?t have a great experience in school,? said Paul Herdman, President and CEO of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware.
Sometimes parents want to be involved in their children?s education but find barriers within the school itself.
?Often times schools like the idea in theory of parent engagement, but create fortress schools where a parent doesn?t feel automatically welcome,? said Herdman.
The Rodel Foundation?s Vision 2015 education initiative for Delaware recommends ?offering leadership and advocacy training to families and instituting school-based family liaisons to strengthen school-family ties? and ?strengthening online tools and outreach programs to inform parents about their children?s progress and the school?s academic standards as well to help families reinforce classroom learning at home.?
Interviews with policymakers and school officials throughout Delaware reveal a variety of approaches that meet local needs for breaking down barriers to parent participation.
With funds from Delaware?s $119 million federal Race to the Top (RTTT) award, the Indian River School District last month opened a Parent Education Center in Frankford, offering hands-on resources ranging from computer access to parenting classes. Anna P. Mote Elementary in Wilmington partnered with ING Direct to launch a financial literacy group for parents. Howard High School of Technology in Wilmington recently hired a full-time parent and community engagement coordinator.
Promoting the importance of parental involvement in education
Lt. Gov. Matt Denn
Building relationships at McIlvaine
The program at McIlvaine Early Childhood Center in Magnolia emphasizes early and frequent contact with parents. The school doesn?t wait until a child gets in trouble to place a phone call to a parent. In fact, teachers reach out to moms and dads months before their children start kindergarten. The goal is to engage parents early and make them partners in education.
?The early phone call establishes rapport,? Denn said.
McIlvaine Principal Sherry Kijowski says students are far more likely to excel when their parents read with them, supervise their homework, and make certain they go to bed on time.
?High parent engagement equates to high parent success because the parents know what is expected to be successful in school,? she said.
Originally a six-room school house, McIlvaine was expanded in 2008 to serve as a new full-day kindergarten for the entire Caesar Rodney School District.
Starting from scratch provided an exciting opportunity for teachers and administrators to collaborate on a mission statement that would be a blueprint for McIlvaine?s educational culture.
?We asked ourselves, ?What is our school?s DNA? What do we want it to be?? ? Kijowski said. ?We want it to be a welcoming place where parents feel they belong.?
Because McIlvaine serves almost all the kindergarteners in the greater Dover area, the student body is an economically and culturally diverse mix. Just over half of the 450 children in the school are eligible for subsidized lunches.
Teachers contact parents of incoming students in June, inviting them to take a sneak peek at the school and inquiring as to how children are progressing in such basic skills as tying their shoes. Through a bullet-point list of questions, the school also gathers essential information on food allergies and special needs.
Early on, administrators learned that many parents work at night and aren?t able to help their children with reading lessons as often as they would like. So McIlvaine mustered an Alphabet Army of more than 30 volunteers to go over lessons with children whose parents aren?t able to help.
?That one-on-one experience of having a parent or grandparent read to a child is just as valuable when the parent or grandparent is donating time to read to someone else?s child,? Kijowski said. Studies show vast differences in achievement between students who are read to and those who are not.
Six-year-old Rachel Mallamace attends McIlvaine, and her mother, Jessica, is a volunteer in the Alphabet Army. Jessica Mallamace is dyslexic and wasn?t diagnosed until she was 17.
?Back then, there was no help for me when I was in kindergarten,? she said. ?It takes a village to keep kids from falling through the cracks.?
Mallamace also attends monthly social events for parents.
?We learn more about what our children are doing at school, and the get-togethers are actually fun,? she said.
After McIlvaine, students attend grades 1 through 5 at elementary schools closest to their homes. Because the students are in the McIlvaine program for only a year, it is difficult to gather statistics that show the academic impact of involving parents early. But Kijowski is confident the seeds sown at McIlvaine will continue to bear fruit throughout a child?s education.
?You can?t measure everything with a yardstick,? she said. ?You just do the right thing.?
Howard tackles challenge of high school parent involvement
At the high school level as well, educators are reaching out to parents even though there is no guarantee of measurable results, especially if parents were not active previously in school activities.
?At the high school level, it is very difficult to gain traction after you get past those parents who are boosters for the band and the athletic teams,? said Demarest, spokeswoman for the New Castle County Vocational-Technical School District. ?It is a much tougher nut to crack.?
Howard High School of Technology opened a parent information resource center at the school in Spring 2009, the first within a high school in Delaware. This year, engaging families and the community became a formal part of the school?s plan after it was one of four schools designated last August to enter the state?s Partnership Zone, a program designed to raise the bar at underperforming schools.
The plan included the hiring of a on-site parent coordinator to increase parent outreach and support services ? targeting families of students struggling.
?The fact that they created a position solely for the purpose of reaching out to parents is a significant act,? Demarest said.
Mote addresses language needs of parents
English language proficiency significantly affects parents? role in schools, according to the Child Trends Databank. Its research from 2007 showed that ?57 percent of parents who do not speak English reported attending a school event, compared with 63 percent of parents where one parent does not speak English, and 77 percent of parents who both spoke English.?
At Anna P. Mote Elementary in Wilmington, nearly three in four students are Hispanic. More than half live in homes where parents speak little or no English.
?It was clear that to educate our children we also had to create opportunities for change for parents,? said Aaron Selekman, who has been principal for five years. He remembers when the days when only about three quarters of the chairs would be filled for Mote?s annual music concert.
?Now we have three concerts, and every chair is filled,? he said.
The school installed an audio system that enables parents to listen to presentations in Spanish. Signs throughout the school are printed in English and Spanish, and there are interpreters on hand at all times.
And parents aren?t just coming for the concerts. They respond to other invitations throughout the year.
?It?s not about having one or two big parent events each year,? Selekman said. ?It?s about creating many meaningful smaller opportunities.?
In the Laugh and Learn program, parents meet twice a month for a social gathering, followed by an educational presentation. Topics have included nutrition, bullying, and planning for college.
During Homework Club, kids work on their assignments while their parents take an English class. On Mom?s Morning Out, parents take a field trip to the public library.
?Many of [the parents] get their first library cards,? Selekman says. ?That one small act could lead to a lifetime of reading. From there, who knows how far they will go??
Indian River?s parent center targets struggling families
With its 12 computers and one full-time staff member, the Indian River School District?s new Parent Educational Center at the G.W. Carver Educational Center in Frankford offers families access and help in applying for state and federal health and wellness programs, coordinating referrals to outside agencies. It helps parents find jobs and places to live. It addresses basic parenting skills such as helping their children with homework, and life skills such as planning a family budget. And it offers a GED program and classes in conversational English for parents.
The idea is to support not just the child in the school, but to strengthen the family around the child so that the child will have greater outcomes.
?We?re trying to bridge the gap between schools and families,? said Walter Smith, assistant principal at the G.W. Carver Educational Center.
Indian River Superintendent Susan Bunting dreams the center will be a place where parents can go and get answers, where they will not just be handed pamphlets, but work with a resource person who can guide them and support them.
Nika Reid, who was a guidance counselor for 12 years before being hired to run the center in January, has begun offering parenting workshops such as ?Setting Limits You Can Live With.? She also has worked to strengthen partnerships with agencies that help meet the needs of families.
Bunting sees the current services as just the beginning of what the center will offer the community. ?We will respond to what the parents tell us they need,? she said.
?My daughter is in middle school, I want her to go to college,? said Irma Rivera. The Frankford mother said she plans to visit the center to learn to save money and find scholarships.? She hopes in a few years she will have the funds to send her daughter to college, and her daughter will have the grades to get accepted to the college of her dreams.
Source: http://www.delawarefirst.org/1_government_and_politics/parental-involvement-education/
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