Parent Involvement Efforts

Recently both elementary schools that I work in Bismarck, ND received a considerable amount of money from the federal government through the PIRC grant to increase parental involvement in our school communities.

Parent Information and Resource Center or PIRCs help implement successful and effective parental involvement policies, programs and activities. Because research has shown a strong positive correlation between student academic achievement and parental involvement, more money and resources are being dedicated to strengthening the partnership between school and home. As stated in our text, this is so important it is the eighth goal of Goals 2000 Educate America Act of 1994. It is well known that high performing schools engage parents as partners in the education process. They welcome parents and keep them informed. They look for ways to actively engage parents in helping their students.
Our text also provides great tips for meeting with parents and how to best convey important information effectively, but it also discussed the changing face of our families in this nation. There are more two-parent working homes, single parent homes, more blended families and therefore fewer and fewer parents are making themselves available for a meeting with their child’s teachers in the first place. As a result, proponents say PIRC grants may be more important than ever.
Currently, our staff members are meeting this summer to plan activities that will begin immediately this fall. One idea discussed will be to host in-service nights to provide training to parents on using Power School to monitor their students’ attendance and grades. Another idea is to host a Family Math Night to show parents what activities might be done at home to reinforce math skills. We are investigating spending some dollars on creating a parenting resource area of our library and securing more dollars to have the school library open evenings and weekends for parents to use the computers and other resources.
Now comes the controversial part of this BLOG. These all sound like great ideas, right? And the research is there to back up the positive correlation between parent involvement and student achievement, right? But a very wise colleague of mine who retired last year asked me this question just before her last day, “When did we start spending more time, money and energy on trying to rehabilitate poor parents than we do trying to catch this generation from falling?” She said her last two years in the Title I program at our school had her spending more and more of her time planning events for parents than she spent planning learning lessons for her students. The final straw for her came the day a reading student of hers came to her door after school had just let out and asked her to listen to her read the new book she had just learned. Mrs. X had to say, “No”. She didn’t have time because she had to finish the last minute details for that night’s parent activity event.
I agree that many parents just need to be shown what they need to do to help their child do their best in school and they will do it, but I don’t know if we should be using precious educational money to chase down parents with 6, 7, sometimes 8 events a year to try to get them to care. If 1, 2 or maybe even 3 outreach attempts don’t do it, why would 6? When do we say, “Those parents had their chance to be students. Now we need to turn our attention, time, and money towards this next generation and give them the same shot.” Can you imagine the extended school programs, extra instructional assistants and smaller class sizes those dollars could provide? Isn’t there a positive correlation between those things and student achievement, too?