Making a Difference at Your Child's School
In today's world of higher expectations for school performance, achievement gaps and shrinking school budgets, parents may feel bewildered about how they can best help their school. Where do you start? What kind of contribution really matters? Read on to find answers to these questions and to learn tips on how to make a difference at your child's school.
Two Models of Parental Involvement
There are two models of parent involvement: the standard model and the new, according to The Case for Parent Leadership (published by KSA-Plus Communications and The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence). The standard model includes such traditional activities as volunteering in the classroom or on the playground, helping with homework, coaching sports teams, fundraising and, of course, attending PTA meetings.
10 Tips on How to Make a Difference
No matter how you choose to get involved at your school, here are ten tips to guide you in becoming an effective parent leader striving to make a difference at your school:
- Speak up if you are confused, need information, or see something that seems wrong to you.
- Identify a specific need or issue that you can work on.
- Build a relationship with the principal so that you can set goals and expectations with him or her.
- Don't go it alone. Build consensus. Talk to other parents. Reach out to those who usually don't participate.
- Learn how to run a meeting.
- Build your case. Research the issue. This might mean learning the voting history of the school board members, finding out if other schools or districts have attempted something similar to your project, or gathering data from a scientific study.
- Get to know your school's budget. Know what questions to ask of whom; know what documents you'll need.
- Learn to use the media strategically to advance your cause.
- To help prevent blaming and provide a common goal, emphasize that your efforts are focused on improving the school and raising student achievement.
- Today's parent leader must think about the interests of all the children in their school, not just their own.
The standard model is no doubt laudable, but the new model of parental involvement brings something more to the equation: a partnership to improve schools. No longer should parents assume that school officials and teachers are the experts and parents have, at best, only a supportive role in the schools. Today's parents can play a significant role by holding schools accountable, setting high expectations for school facilities and school-level achievement, and helping to create programs that drive schools to improve.
Some Advice from Parent Leaders
The ways in which a parent can become involved are much more varied than they were in the past and many parents have demonstrated that their involvement does make a difference. Many parents have challenged school lunch programs to improve, banned soda and junk food from school vending machines and exposed fraud in the school district office. Others have formed groups of pre-school parents to support their neighborhood school. Still others have created tutoring programs to close an achievement gap within a school's student population.
Crusade for Better School Nutrition
When San Francisco middle school parent Dana Woldow became aware that kids "were making a lunch out of a giant bottle of soda and a giant bag of chips," she decided something had to be done. Unfortunately, her initial efforts were met with resistance from an uncooperative district nutrition director. Her solution was to go directly to the superintendent to ask permission for a pilot program at her school banning junk food for half a year. Having secured this permission, she and some like-minded parents put together a committee of teachers, students and parents to move the project forward. Through their efforts they were able to prove that banning sodas and junk food from the vending machines and the à la carte food venue could be done, and that revenues from healthy food sales equal (and in this case were greater than) junk food sales.
Dana advises parent leaders to never give up. "You must be committed," she says. "Most of the obstacles that are put in your path are put there by bureaucrats. When they figure out it's easier to give you what you want rather than continue to fightyou, they will give you what you want."
