Parent Involvement

By Jill Wynns

After twenty years of rhetoric about involving parents, we are finally seeing the School District investing money and human resources in supporting services for parents. This is only the beginning; we must explore all avenues for parents ot be more involved, like serving on School Site Councils.

The current administration has demonstrated their commitment to parent involvement in many ways. The Office of Parent Affairs has been professionalized. The STAR schools each have a parent liaison that works with parents at the schools. Many non-STAR schools are starting to use site funds for parent liaisons. Training for School Site Councils has been an important benefit for parents, increasing the capacity of parents to participate in areas formerly the exclusive province of professionals. Last year, the Labor-Management-Community Committee provided leadership for specific training for and about parents participating in Site-Based Budgeting and decision-making.

Last year I authored a resolution to create a Parents' Advisory Council for the Board of Education. Early in my tenure on the Board, a resolution had been passed to have a Parents' Advisory Committee whose members were all appointed by members of the Board. I was initially opposed to the proposal because of the appointed structure. I was not successful in getting it amended to allow the members to be chosen by parents' groups themselves. The Committee was not a success. It was never given a charge or any structure in which to operate. After two years the Committee made recommendations to the Board that an office be set up at the District level for parent programs and that it include a translation office. I was the only Board member who supported these requests. After its recommendations were ignored by the Board and the administration, the entire Committee resigned in protest. The policy remained on the books until last year when the Parents' Advisory Council replaced it. Now we have a formal mechanism for parents to become involved at the District level.

In the last thirty years, there has been a great deal of research on the effects of parents being involved in their children's education. Joyce Epstein has written extensively about the subject and describes seven levels of involvement from being involved in your own child's schoolwork to being a decision-maker. Maybe we should identify running and serving on the Board of Education as the eighth level. It is essential that all of these various opportunities for parents to be involved be encouraged and facilitated.

The San Francisco PTA has always been a partner in representing parents and providing support for school groups. In recent years Parents for Public Schools has begun to play an important role in speaking for parents' concerns. We are fortunate to have strong community partners in this effort. The current administration has started a Translation Unit and has added resources to the Office of Parent Affairs and to schools for parent services. Regular events for parents are part of the school calendar.

I have great hopes that we are in a new era with parents as real partners in our work. In fact, it is one of Superintendent Ackerman's Core Beliefs, "Parents Are Our Partners". During the last school year, I have had two opportunities to learn at Harvard University with teams from the District. In January we send our third team to the Labor/ Management Training for school district teams at the Kennedy School of Government. I went for the second time with our partners from our unions and staff, and, we brought a PTA representative. We are the only school district that ever brought parents as part of their team. This summer we were part of the Public Education Leadership Project, the first-ever joint project of the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Nine school districts came with eight-member teams. We were the only team that had a parent; we were the only team that had a community representative; we were one of three that had a board member. I was so proud to see that we are not only talking about inclusive work; we are finally doing it.