PTA program creates parent advocates
From left, Ruth Gomez, Lisa Lacambra, Marivic Quiba and Isela Ramirez, all graduates of the PTA's School Smarts program, prepare to serve dinner at a training session at Sunshine Gardens Uncomplicated. Credit: Neil Hanshaw
With 117 years of promoting parent involvement nether its collective belt, the PTA thinks it has the right formula for preparation parents in their new watchdog part nether California's reformed school finance and accountability organization.
The PTA program, chosen School Smarts, is aimed at giving simple school parents the tools they need to advocate for their children and their school. The program includes a 7-calendar week series of night meetings, held at school sites, thathighlight the importance of parent involvement for their children's success; explain how the school organisation works at the state, district and school level; and offer effective strategies to use to advocate for alter.
School Smarts is being piloted in xiv school districts and fifty schools throughout California, including Sunshine Gardens Elementary in Due south San Francisco.
On a recent Thursday evening at Sunshine Gardens, nearly two dozen families gathered for dinner before the parents participated in the 2nd weekly School Smarts training session. The sessions concluding from about 6:30 until eight p.m. Child care is provided for the children in the cafeteria, while their parents attend the session in a nearby classroom.
Kimberly Abalos and her girl, Ruthie, help ready out plates for the parent dinner at Sunshine Gardens Elementary. Credit: Neil Hanshaw
Parents who take graduated from the program came to dish out the enchiladas, rice and beans and help the new parents – many new to the land every bit well as California's public schoolhouse system – go acclimated.
The graduates said the programme has been transformative.
Erica Sanchez Vallejo, who graduated from the program 3 years agone, is from Mexico. "Over there parents do not go involved in education," she said. "Here the focus is on educating the parents and beingness involved with your child even if you don't know English. I want to encounter my daughter go all the way to college and graduate. This is what this programme has taught me."
Isela Ramirez said she has become more involved with her children since graduating from the program, expanding their learning beyond the normal school twenty-four hours.
"I read to them daily," she said. "They're involved in sports. I take them to the library. I practice arts and crafts with them. I keep them engaged."
She too attends more school functions, including school lath meetings, and has become vice president of the campus PTA. "I feel similar I accept a vocalism," she said.
Ryan Wibawa – who came with his family, including his now x-year-onetime son Vincent, to the United States ii years ago from Indonesia – was attending his second session of the program. An engineer, Wibawa said he is eager to learn more about the school system and hopes to be involved in making decisions about the use of applied science. He as well notes a difference betwixt the teaching organization in his habitation country and hither.
Ryan Wibawa and his son, Vincent, share dinner before the PTA School Smarts training session. Credit: Neil Hanshaw
"In Indonesia, they are focused on test scores," he said. "Children know what to exercise, but they don't know why they demand to exercise it. Here children are encouraged to exist creative."
"I like it here amend," piped up Vincent.
Colleen You, president of the statewide PTA, said that the School Smarts curriculum is based on research on how to involve parents, and was positively evaluated after its offset twelvemonth in 2010-11 by SRI International. The researchers institute that the vast majority of parents felt much better informed about how to support their children at home and at school later the program than they had before. They as well expressed a much greater willingness to go involved in diverse schoolhouse committees and said they ameliorate understood how to brand changes at their schoolhouse.
Each year, the School Smarts curriculum is revised, You said. This year, session 3 is about the state's Local Control and Accountability Plan, which requires districts to include parents in deciding how funds should be spent to improve student achievement.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is funding the airplane pilot program at no price to schools. But Alameda Unified was so impressed with the pilot that information technology decided to brand it a district programme, this year allocating $five,000 for each of its 10 unproblematic schools. The funds cover child care, interpreters, materials, a light dinner and a stipend for a coordinator.
Often graduates of the program teach the classes.
"Those graduates tin can empathize with the struggles of the new parents," said Barbara Adams, assistant superintendent at Alameda Unified.
Adams said that School Smarts graduates are participating at all levels in her district: school site councils, English language learner advisory committees and the new Local Control and Accountability Committee. School Smarts gives parents an opportunity to "build their self-conviction, know that their advocacy for their child is important, and acquire how to advocate in ways that result in the action they are hoping to accomplish," she said.
Lidia Munoz shows the mask she made representing her son, Joel, who is interested in math and infinite numbers. Credit: Neil Hanshaw
Creativity is also office of the lesson plan in Schoolhouse Smarts, which includes an art project in most of the sessions. Part of the programme's goal is to plow parents into advocates for including arts in the curriculum.
On this Thursday, Sunshine Gardens parents gathered in the 5th course classroom of instructor Michelle Carabes, who leads the PTA training sessions. Her room is an advertisement for how to use fine art to brand other subjects, such every bit math, come alive.
Not an inch of wall space is spared, as children's colorful projects dominate the room, even hanging in the air from clotheslines. One clothesline holds a series of flowers called "Blooming Facts," a project in which students assign numbers to the letters in their first name (A=1; B=2, etc.), then add up the numbers to determine whether their "name" is a prime or a composite. Students show how many factors are in their name'due south number by drawing petals for each factor on the flowers they have created.
The parents' projection that Th – to brand paper masks that represent their kid – also gives them a chance to go to know each other. Parents from different cultures and economical backgrounds sit on short, kid-sized chairs around tables, exchanging ideas, materials and laughter.
Later completing their masks, 1 parent from each table held up a mask and explained information technology.
Lidia Munoz, who has a 5th form girl at Sunshine Gardens, chose to depict her 17-year-old son, Joel. Joel is focused on math, peculiarly the issue of infinity. She made the pupils in the mask'southward eyes the mathematical sign of pi, an infinite number.
Kimberly Abalos held up a pinkish mask with a tiara representing her daughter, Ruthie, 7, who loves books, trip the light fantastic and fantasy. "I gave her only one ear," Abalos quipped, "because she halfway listens to me."
Wibawa'south mask of the quick-to-comment Vincent had an exclamation mark in the oral fissure.
The art element is a favorite amid parents. "I reconnected with the artist in me afterwards so many years," said Marivic Quiba, a graduate of the program.
Roberto Minero works on a mask to represent his kid at a training session for parents at Sunshine Gardens. Credit: Neil Hanshaw
Quiba summed up what she learned from School Smarts in a speech at a Parent Engagement Nighttime meeting at Sunshine Gardens, held to encourage parents to sign upward for the training programme.
The program has showed her that "learning begins at dwelling, then at school, so back dwelling – it'south just a cycle," she said. "It's taught me how to go involved, to understand the school system, to know your child'southward progress and what they're learning."
Schoolhouse Smarts has likewise taught her "to exist visible," she said, "to speak upwards for the children to ensure they receive the education they so richly deserve."
Susan Frey covers expanded learning fourth dimension. Contact her. Sign upwardly hither for a no-cost online subscription to EdSource Today for reports from the largest didactics reporting team in California.
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Source: https://edsource.org/2014/pta-program-creates-parent-advocates/57755
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