PEN’s mission begins with engaging parents and guardians seeking information about schools; because our members tend to become more involved as volunteers and leaders at their schools, we have a magnified impact on the schools and our District.
But much as our schools need the support of volunteers, the most basic level of parent engagement remains the most important: if every child served by PUSD had at least one parent or guardian with the knowledge, understanding, skills, and information to effectively support that child’s academic journey, our schools and our district would be the envy of the nation.
This past fall, a group of parent leaders – including PEN honorees Michelle Calva-Despard and Cushon Bell and PEN staff Susan Schwartz and Laura Diaz – met with PUSD staff from the Welcome Center and the Office of Communications to convene the Parent Engagement Action Team. The Team’s mission? To optimize the parent engagement conditions within PUSD necessary for each child to reach his or her full potential.
The Action Team presented its charter to the School Board in February. This issue of Parent Network shares that overview along with a more detailed update on what the Team is doing to accomplish its objectives:
1. Strengthen and support the network of relationships among parent engagement stakeholders by establishing PEAT as a hub for authentic communication, shared responsibility and effective partnership.
2. Establish common expectations about the roles and relationships among parents and educators and the knowledge, skills and responsibilities each must have to collaborate effectively in support of student success.
Another Parent Organization?
Wait a minute, you may be thinking, isn’t parent engagement what PTA, ELAC, AAPC, Site Council, and their District-level counterparts (not to mention the CAC and the GATE Leadership Team) are all about?
“We’re not a new parent council or organization!” says Michelle Calva-Despard. “We didn’t even want to use an acronym, because we didn’t want to add to the alphabet soup that’s already out there sending us emails and filling our days and nights with meetings.”
“What I felt was missing was a hub for connecting all those spokes that reach out to different parts of the parent community – and for helping the District do a better job of connecting with parents who aren’t affiliated with any of the parent councils or committees.”
A Strategic Approach to Parent Engagement
To understand the genesis of the Action Team, it helps to go back a few years. In 2010, the School District revised its Strategic Plan with extensive input from students, teachers, parents, and the larger community. In response to this community input, the Strategic Plan Steering Committee recommended – and the Board approved – adding parent engagement as a strategic priority. Parent engagement was defined as: "a partnership between PUSD and families with a mutual commitment to:
- Build and maintain trusting relationships characterized by openness, integrity, respect, a welcoming environment, and two-way communication;
- Promote shared responsibility for decision making, student academic performance, and school improvement;
- Act collaboratively as informed advocates for ALL children by modeling the values, culture, and priorities adopted in the PUSD strategic plan."
A set of goals and preliminary plan for achieving them was outlined before Superintendent Diaz resigned, but with the transition to a new administration and a more than six-month gap between former Communications Director Binti Harvey’s resignation and Wolfson’s start date last October, implementation efforts were limited to what Welcome Center staff could accomplish in their roles as liaisons to the various school sites and parent councils.
But, as Michelle Calva-Despard points out, “District staff can only do so much to connect with parents. There just aren’t enough staff people to do it alone. But parent leaders at the school sites – or even on the District-level councils – cannot do it alone either. We’re hampered by the fact that we don’t have an effective way to communicate with each other.”
Until now, there has not been a parent-driven action team at the District level. PTA Council, DAC, DELAC, AAPC, CAC, and the GATE Team have monthly meetings, but these are predominantly opportunities for District staff to share information with each parent council, and for the councils to conduct their own business.
“The District-level council meetings serve a useful purpose, but there’s a silo effect; sometimes we’re all getting the same information, but without the chance to discuss it together, we miss opportunities to identify common objectives or coordinate our activities.” “I’ll get emails about the same event from all these different groups. It’s great that we’re all supporting the schools, but it would be better if we could streamline that communication,” says Calva-Despard.
For a time the Welcome Center convened a Parent and Community Leadership Council. Representatives from each of the parent groups (along with other community organizations) were invited to participate in the monthly meetings, but the agenda was set by District staff. Meeting participants had a chance to hear about what other groups were doing, but because the PCLC was not a forum for action, the group lacked a sense of purpose, and participation fell off.
With the arrival of Adam Wolfson as Director of Communications and Community Engagement last October, parents like Calva-Despard, Bell, and others saw an opportunity to create the missing hub, and to accelerate the pace of (and parent involvement in) implementation of the parent engagement piece of the Strategic Plan.
Action!
The Action Team has been meeting monthly. In addition to co-chairs Michelle Calva-Despard and Cushon Bell and PEN staff Laura Diaz and Susan Schwartz, regular "team members" have included parents Lorena Ramirez and Beverly Sims, Board Member Kim Kenne (also a current PUSD parent), Welcome Center staff Theresa Doran and Tracy Mikuriya, and Adam Wolfson and Hilda Ramirez-Horvath from the District Communications Office.
Between meetings, participants are assigned to network with other stakeholder groups (or one-on-one with representatives from those groups) to share Action Team discussions and solicit input on critical questions and next steps. Working groups meet as needed between Team meetings to move projects forward. (See below for list of current projects; contact Cushon Bell if you would like to work on any of the tasks.)
Currently, the Action Team is working on the following projects:
Project: Develop hub/network of communication and relationships
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Create a webpage where anyone can learn about the District’s parent engagement plan, connect with the PEAT, access parent engagement resources, share best practices, etc. |
PEN staff and other Action Team members are working with Hilda Ramirez-Horvath in the Communications office to set up a PEAT page on district website. |
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Develop list of key groups/people to be nodes on the network. |
Click here for list of groups with which PEAT team members are connected. |
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Assign network nodes to PEAT members to begin developing relationships and communications. |
PEAT participants meet face to face with other groups or their representatives between monthly PEAT meetings to exchange information and get input. |
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Welcome Center liaisons assigned to schools to develop relationships and work with community assistants or other contacts. |
See the Welcome Center page on the PUSD website for liaison name & contact info as well as which schools each liaison is assigned to. |
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Add content/resources to website as found. |
PEN Outreach Director Laura Diaz has already assembled a list of resource links, which will be part of the PEAT webpage when it goes live next month. |
Project: Develop, communicate and implement an ‘informed/engaged parent’ profile
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Develop draft version of parent profile and get feedback from key groups |
Draft parent profile (knowledge, skills, and actions) is being shared with the Teachers Union (UTP) and are the various parent councils (PTA, AAPC, ELAC) |
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Create a parent checklist, based on the profile, of knowledge/skills/information a parent or guardian needs to engage effectively on behalf of his or her student. |
PEAT merging draft parent profile (knowledge, skills, and actions) with a “What Involved Parent Knows” checklist created by the Welcome Center. |
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Goal is to disseminate a district-wide “what engaged parent knows” checklist by start of next school year. |
PEAT working with Communications Office to ensure that checklist goes to administrators and staff as well as parents, so that we can all be (literally) on the same page! |
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Ensure that school sites and District office staff have information readily available for each item on the checklist so that a parent or guardian who doesn’t understand or know how to do something on the list can get a clear, consistent response, no matter which staff person s/he approaches. |
Some of this information is the same for every school, but some of it is school- (or in a few cases teacher-) specific. We will need the support of the Superintendent and Communications Office to make sure that each school site has a complete set of information ready to give parents – and that all site staff have that information available or know where to find it. |
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Write implementation plan needed to make parent profile come true. |
Some of the things that engaged parents know are pretty straightforward (e.g., when my child is sick I call the school and report the absence to the attendance office). Other items in the profile/checklist may require skills development – e.g., how to talk with your child’s teacher when your child is struggling academically or socially. Still other items, such as secondary school parents knowing how to use the Parent Portal, may require a combination of information (where do I get an access code?), training (how do I log on and how do I navigate the information screens?) AND cooperation (how do we encourage/support more secondary teachers to enter assignments and grades as well as attendance data in the system?) |
Participation in the Parent Engagement Action Team is open to any parent. Once the webpage is up (which should be before the end of May), it will include meeting dates, agendas, and summaries; opportunities to comment on works-in-progress (such as the “Engaged Parent Profile”); resources; and contact information.
The next scheduled meeting is May 17 at 9:45 am. For more information or to receive an agenda and meeting details, contact Cushon Bell.
