District Administration - November/December 2011 - (Page 42)

The Ultimate Empowerment Program for Parents transformed her life. “Before LSNA, I was isolated at home and didn’t know I had skills that would be valuable to mentoring children,” she says. “But the program showed me that I had something to offer.” A Cord of Three Strands It was LSNA’s effectiveness in helping immigrant parents such as Barrera overcome their fears of entering schools and dealing with administrators and teachers that led Hong to study the program. As a former elementary school teacher in Montgomery County (Md.) Public Schools and Boston (Mass.) Public Schools, she was interested in parent engagement in schools. When she called students’ homes to share with parents something positive their child had done in class, she’d inevitably be greeted by a long silence after introducing herself. When she explained why she was calling, they’d be overwhelmed with relief. “The fact that they automatically expected something was wrong because the teacher was calling spoke volumes,” she says. “I wanted to establish ongoing relationships with them which would help me learn about and better teach their children.” Hong’s premise for her book is that the relationship with the parents and community is most important for student success, and that schools have much to learn about how student success ties into their families and cultures. Hong classifies the LSNA procedure for changing the nature of this relationship into three categories: induction, integration and investment. Induction: Breaking down traditional barriers of suspicion, fear and anxiety to get schools and parents comfortable with each other is the first step in transforming school-community relationships. For many immigrants, parents being involved in their children’s schools is an alien concept. “In Mexico, schools were only for teachers and students,” Barrera says. Barrera says parent training involves taking parents through the process of 42 November/December 2011 Last September, Logan Square parents celebrated the Zapata Apartments groundbreaking, which allows immigrant families to financially afford to stay in their neighborhood without having to give up the local Funston Elementary School. LSNA members had previously educated parents about an expensive condo-building project in the works, which would have forced them out. discovering what skills they have to offer to the educational process. “Even parents who don’t speak English can be useful in bilingual or ESL classes,” she says. In 1994 when the parent mentor program started, initial reactions from many teachers were skeptical, says Hong. “They told me they’d been worried that parents might want to spy on them or criticize them in front of other parents,” she recalls. It took a little time for the trust to develop. “When we started the parent mentor program, only five teachers signed up, but after that first year, 30 signed up,” Brown says. The teacher demand for par- taught pupils about forensic investigations, and challenged them to solve a pretend crime in the school building. This galvanized parent participation and led to a more positive view of the school, says Zrike, who moved to Chicago last January to “scale up” parent engagement. Integration: Connecting parents to each other and to staff is the next step Hong identified in LSNA’s success in building school-parent relationships. She says that over time, with parents helping out in classrooms—seeing firsthand how challenging teaching can be—they better “They [teachers] told me they’d been worried that parents might want to spy on them or criticize them in front of other parents.” –Soo Hong, author, A Cord of Three Strands ent mentors now regularly exceeds the number available. Stephen Zrike, a former principal from the Boston Public Schools and now a chief area officer of the Chicago Public Schools, says he’s never seen the kind of parent involvement that LSNA has made possible. As principal at Blackstone Elementary, a turnaround school in Boston, he attempted to build relationships with parents in a high-poverty neighborhood. One of his solutions was to open up the school to families for nonacademic Friday night activities, including a CSI night which brought in Boston police officers, understood and respected teachers faced with students who don’t complete homework or who have behavioral problems. The relationship also enlightened teachers, most of whom did not live in the Logan Square community. They came to understand better the economic, language and cultural assimilation struggles faced by students and parents. Zrike says that “taking it on the road,” or getting teachers into the community, was a key to success in Boston and also in LSNA. In Boston, he had teachers make at least five home visits to students during the summer, which they could count District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - November/December 2011

District Administration - November/December 2011
Contents
From the Editor
News Update
Inside the Law
Administrator Profile
District Profile
CIO news
How to Update Your Network on a Budget
The Importance of IT Team Unity
Creating an Anti-Bullying Program With the Resources You Have
The Ultimate Empowerment Program for Parents
Taking the Helm in Cheating Scandals
Readers’ Choice: Top 100 Products
New Directions
Professional Opinion
Problem/Solution
Going Mobile

District Administration - November/December 2011