Susan Fedor/00-01/Diary Entry 5

Entry # 5: Parents as Partners?

I am working on a parent involvement article at Crossroads School for our state administrator's association magazine. I have been writing this article in my head for two months now, making a random note or two. My problem is perspective. On any given day, it shifts dramatically. Some days it's "Parent involvement: you have to love it." Other days, having a school where the students already live in their own apartments seems like an appealing prospect!

Longing for self-sustaining students was last week's view. I had conferences with two sets of parents. Their lack of trust in the school was apparent from the outset. Each set came to the table assuming that a wrong would be righted only through their advocacy. And a aggressive, accusatory advocacy it was.

One was threatening a lawsuit. The other acknowledged that meeting with me, the principal, was an empty gesture and that his real destination was the school board. One parent felt that his child was a victim of a teacher's discrimination and dislike. Another felt the teacher had punished his child for inadequate cause. Both said in one way or another, "I know my child, and know when he is lying. He was not lying. Therefore, the teacher is wrong."

It is a reoccurring theme and one that never ceases to amaze me. And the parents refuse to talk to the teacher without my involvement, ratcheting up the seriousness of the discussion right from the start. After talking with both sets of parents in these separate incidents, I determined that the unreasonableness of both was so extreme that the teacher needed my presence. And, in both cases, we -- the teacher and I -- left the conferences having resolved the issues at hand to the temporary satisfaction of the parents. They will, I fear, be back.

Parent involvement is often student-specific

This is the downside of parental involvement. The other aspect of parental involvement that includes taking the bad with the good is a variation on the notion that "all politics is local." For some parents, their involvement in school affairs is only about their child -- to the exclusion of the welfare of all others. The School Improvement Council, the PTO Board, and the school board become venues to advocate for what they think is best for their child. While this view is understandable, it is also the principal's responsibility to broaden it.

Nonetheless, these trying encounters notwithstanding, we desire the involvement of our parents. We lament the unwritten agreement some seem to have made with us: "Don't bother me and I won't bother you." It is the agreement that many of the parents of our parents had with the school. They know no other way of relating to us.

Our North Star Team is a group of students who were predicted to have difficulty finding success in sixth grade. We have engineered everything over which we have control: length of school day, curriculum, school day schedule, and classroom procedures. Reading the literature about the KIPP Schools enjoying so much apparent success, we check off our efforts as being in concert with their plan. But there is one notable exception: the component that deals with parental involvement.

The KIPP parents sign a contract, a "Commitment to Excellence," promising to check homework and read with their child each night. Several of our North Star parents will no longer answer our telephone calls even when we know they are hearing our ring. Caller ID is not working in our favor.

In contrast is a parent who does not even recognize that he is doing everything we could hope. I went into the local dry cleaners on Friday evening, the week PACT scores were released statewide. The owner was crowing over the fine showing of his daughter's school (in a nearby district). I pointed out, with a bit of chagrin, that the performance of this school was not surprising given that it was a magnet school which required a commitment on the part of parents for children to be accepted there.

I told him that this school was not a random sample of the students in his district. He was truly astounded, which astounded me! He did not know that other parents did not look over homework nightly and did not read to their young children regularly. He was genuinely surprised to learn that all parents did not know to do what he did almost instinctively.

How to we help all parents "know what to do"?

So, that is the challenge. How do we get all parents to know what some already know and do in order to promote the success of children in school? We know there is no silver bullet, so we keep on doing all the things I will include in my journal article.

We will continue our "Principal Listens" sessions. We will continue to seek feedback through surveys and focus groups. We will continue School Improvement Councils, PTO Boards, newsletters, listserv discussion groups, updating our website, publishing e-mail addresses, and designating a team communicator (a contact teacher for each team who will "own" whatever problem she is presented), parenting workshops, and guidance sessions for students who make failing grades and their parents (complete with complimentary lunch.)

We will continue interactive homework assignments, invitations for parents to visit schools and positive occasions for them to do so, and we will continue to focus on an invitational climate in our front office and from our support staff. We will continue to do whatever it takes, and this means we never stop thinking about what else we can do.

What I wish we could do involves some different ways of doing business. I would like to establish routine home visits that parents would view as an expression of interest and a willingness to "come to them" rather than their being summoned for an imagined reprimand at the school. I would like for us to make as many visits as needed to help parents understand and give them the wherewithal to help their children succeed.

Second, I would like to see a financial commitment on the part of our school board to fund lower student-teacher ratios. All the convincing studies I read note that the establishing of a close, primary relationship between teachers and students and parents is key to student academic success.

I love this work. Having something to hope for gives me the determination to meet the challenges of the day -- and the resolute will to prevail. No matter what the obstacles to making parents our partners, we cannot turn away from the mandate to do so.

There can be no onset of a winter of despair when we work in a school. The seasons of hope and possibility roll one into the other. Each nine weeks becomes a new window of success for everyone. Mistakes can be remedied. New plans formulated. There is, as Camus noted, an invincible summer that prevails.