External Community Factors
Our school has been making more of a concerted effort to include family and our community into our school for the last 5 years. We have a “Walk About” program in which parents come and walk around campus during lunch. We have been alerting stores to our need for school supplies and we are trying to revamp our Curriculum Night and Open House, starting with trying to figure out why parents don’t come. The articles this week about “Organizing Family and Community Connections With Schools: How Do School Staff Build Meaningful Relationships With All Stakeholders?” give some good advise for how to start the conversations with parents. I am very thankful that my administrators ask for staff input and are well-versed in research so that the decisions they make about our school are as good as they can be.
The neighborhood around my school has changed dramatically in the last 10 years (even in the last 5 since I have been there). Our families are so busy trying to live their every day lives that school is often seen as a burden and not as a way to liberate students from lives of poverty. Many of our parents don’t speak English well and/or struggled in school so they are nervous about coming back. Other parents feel like their high school students can be “on their own” now and don’t need a lot of parenting. We need to work on sending the message that high schoolers need parents too and our school wants parents to feel comfortable to be on campus.
Our school is trying to address barriers to family and community involvement (pg 4, Family and Community Connections). We have Open House every year and only the AP and Honors parents come. We are working on trying to figure out why more parents don’t come. Are they not comfortable on campus? Do they not see the importance of coming? Is there importance in coming? Have they already been to too many Open Houses with older siblings?
The meeting strategy discussed on page 5 seems like an interesting approach. Why not ask those involved in the community what the community looks like to them and why they aren’t involved? Using curriculum that is relevant to students lives outside of school and involves their parents and family members may be a good way to show parents how to stay involved in their high school students’ lives. We are working specifically with our AVID parents to see how to get them involved in hopes of generalizing that to other parents.
The message needs to get out that teachers, administrators, students, and parents are a team and can work more effectively as a team than we can alone.
alumpe said,
October 19, 2009 at 10:09 am
As with most districts in Puget Sound, you are experiencing demographic shifts. It sounds like you and your district are being proactive rather than reactive.