 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
You
are here: Lessons Learned from 15 Years of Family Engagement
through Powerful Schools
Parent and community involvement and engagement seems to be a factor in student success in schools. Study after study correlates academic achievement with high levels of parent involvement. Typically these are schools in which most students are from middle-income families. Around the country there are schools where learning and high academic achievement are matched with different demographics, with high percentage of English language learners and high percentage of low-income families. These much-studied schools often display greater parent engagement when compared with demographically similar, lower performing schools.
Sometimes parent involvement is credited with breaking the wretched trend that matches demographics to academic outcomes for students. But not always, or even typically. Many studies strongly suggest it is the highly focused and well-trained educators in a turnaround school who are to be credited for student academic success. Other times it is the school leadership that makes the change possible. There is no straight-line between family engagement and academic achievement. Yet, family engagement in school is an essential element of many factors contributing to learning: a positive school climate, student attendance, homework completion and development of study skills, school community building, discipline issues, teacher support, student commitment to learning and perhaps student stability, sticking with a school.
Powerful Schools' Goals
Fifteen years ago when Powerful Schools was founded, family and neighborhood engagement was THE strategy for helping our partner schools. As a community-based nonprofit we could enlarge a school's constellation of community volunteers and supporters and connect with school families from a variety of neighborhood avenues, not just via the PTA. As a perceptive school partner we could insure that well intended help actually hit the mark, supporting the students and educators in the most customized ways: matching volunteer parents as mentors for students selected by teachers and counselors; holding lifelong learning classes after school and evenings for adults and students, including computer literacy, ESL, parenting, art and music classes for adults; and training students and parents together to use technology for school and home purposes.
Our Family Engaging Programs
Academic Programs. Since its beginning, Powerful Schools has developed academic programs in reading, writing and the arts by working most closely with students and their teachers. Based on our years of experience with elementary schools, we know that one of the additional benefits of family engagement is building support for students and for more sustained change in schools. Therefore we include a family component in the design of each of our academic programs. We hold family literacy nights for whole families to learn more about the activities employed at school so they can support young readers at home and nurture the preschool learners as well. We hire and train parents and neighbors to be the reading tutors who work in school each day We guide parents to support writing at home with tips and ideas for everything from simple bookbinding to using a writers' notebook as the students do at school to support building ideas rather than focusing first on conventions. We facilitate evening, open-mike, student author readings at a local coffeehouse – free cocoa for every young author who signs up to read.
After School Programs. Community Schools, our after-school program, now has two important components. The first is the most evident. We design a set of classes for each school we work with based on advice we learn from parent surveys. We find and train the instructors, often found within a school's family connections. We reach out to families to support their students to attend after school classes and provide all coordination tasks ranging from registrations and permission to safety and snacks.
The second, less visible, component is family engagement in schools. It is less visible because we work behind the scenes with school members, from principal and teachers to parent representatives and school services staff such as family support workers. Together we plan and then implement a year's worth of family engagement activities that meet the objectives of parents and educators combined -- activities that address different kinds of families from different language groups, or different grade bands or with different interests. We minimize the number of Powerful Schools-sponsored family programs in order to extend, enrich and highlight educator and parent-led activities.
Bridge Building. Our prime contribution, in addition to convening this family engagement planning and coordination, continues to be as a community bridge. We bring in artists, other nonprofit organizations and local business people who can enhance the selected activities. The community is full of amazing resources and Powerful Schools works to bring them into schools where they can be most useful or accessible for parents: literary clowns, actors who dramatize children's books, librarians to demonstrate how to read in ways that build active listening skills, multicultural arts groups to perform and teach, women's health educators and so many more.
We have learned that family activities should be family-led, well attended by school staff as well as parents and designed to promote relationships between families as well as between families and educators. The very basic goal is to make school as welcoming a place as possible. At the beginning of each school year the goal is to hold family events which are well organized, focused and targeted to the special interests of different constituencies in the school community. Then success is measured in the quantity and diversity of attendance and participation during the event. As each school year progresses the simple mark of success is the number and diversity of families coming to school on their own initiative and for a range of reasons rather than just on organized family nights.
Suggested Reading
Anne T. Henderson & Karen L. Mapp, (2002) A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family and Community Connections on Student Achievement, Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, http://www.sedl.org.
Anne Henderson, Bonnie Jacob, Adam Kernan-Schloss & Bev Raimondo, (2004) The Case for Parent Leadership, http://www.centerforparentleadership.org
Rebecca Sadinsky, Powerful Schools executive director has over 20 years experience leading community development and neighborhood programs. She was the founding manager of the Neighborhood Matching Fund of the City of Seattle's Department of Neighborhoods, a Program Officer for Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, a national affordable housing developer, and the Neighborhood Programs Director of Neighborhood House. She has received numerous awards for her achievements, including the Seattle Management Association Outstanding Management Award in 2001. Ms. Sadinsky was a founding volunteer member of Powerful Schools, playing a leading role in the initial implementation of our first program, Community Schools. She can be reached at rsadinsky@powerfulschools.org.
©January 2006 New Horizons for Learning
http://www.newhorizons.org
info@newhorizons.orgFor permission to redistribute, please go to:
New Horizons for Learning Copyright and Permission Information