There is clear and compelling evidence of the importance of parental actions on children’s achievement in school. Thus, much of the promise of charter schools rests on their ability to involve parents and the community in constructive ways. Additionally, as schools of choice, charter schools have to win and maintain families’ approval in order to keep students enrolled. This piece provides information and resources on how to create charter schools that are deeply connected to their communities.
II. Involving Families in Schools
Family-friendly schools find a variety of ways to involve families. They look for opportunities to support families, train staff to work with them, and consciously avoid common obstacles to family involvement. Five key strategies may help to create a family friendly school.
Seek to involve families in the design and start-up phases, learning about their needs and expectations. While some charter schools have a pre-determined design, planning the school with family and community input can help ensure that it meets real needs and gains valuable support. Charter developers can assess community group, parent, and general public opinion about their expectations for the school by means of surveys, public meetings, and focus groups. Let this input inform your guiding principles in designing your program. Once the design takes shape, be sure to share the school’s mission and vision with the community and parents, explaining program content, objectives, and the rationale for instructional strategies. Incorporate additional feedback into the design.
Offer a variety of ways for families to be involved. When schools offer many different sorts of activities -- from helping with homework to volunteering and providing input on decisions -- families can choose to enter the school world in a way that is comfortable to them. Help families establish a home environment that supports their children as students, and teach them how to help their children learn at home. Recruit family members to support the school as volunteers, assisting at the school, and serving on advisory or decision-making committees and task forces. Enrich your curriculum by incorporating the knowledge, talents, and abilities of family members. Consider the example of St. Paul Family Learning Center Charter School, which collects information on experiences family members are willing to share with students and then prepares a rich database of community resources that teachers and students can draw on for projects and support.
Consider developing contracts with your students’ parents. Some charter schools have developed contracts that parents are asked to sign to affirm that they will be involved with their children’s education. Contracts may ask parents to agree to provide a certain number of hours of their time in volunteer activities for the school. One word of caution: the contract should be well thought-out, and staff should take care that it does not have the potential to alienate parents or violate laws regarding open admissions to charter schools. See our Resources section for links to sample parent contracts.
Provide a family resource center. A family resource center can offer families opportunities to connect with each other, as well as offer educational and social events. By serving the various needs of families, a resource center can help parents and caregivers support their children well. Seek equipment and supplies through donations, and advertise the center to let parents know it is there and what it offers. Provide a comfortable, welcoming space that has a variety of resources on hand, from books and pamphlets, to games, videotapes, and tip sheets on parenting topics.
Train staff to involve families. Charter school leaders may wish to encourage or mandate training activities to help personnel gain the skills to do an effective job of involving families. Offer joint parent/teacher in-service sessions on communication, and encourage self-study efforts, such as visits to other schools to see how they successfully involve family and community.
III. Communicating with Families
Effective communication is particularly critical for schools of choice and schools pursuing nontraditional programs. To sustain a family-friendly atmosphere, charter school leaders need to communicate about individual student and whole school progress honestly and thoroughly. They must also seek to improve their school’s programs and responsiveness to family and community members. Several strategies can be employed to communicate effectively with families.
Build trust and rapport with families. Involve families in the development of a family/student handbook that explains the mission, goals and objectives of the school as well as details of school policy. Invite families to an open house and to events throughout the year. Make school staff easily accessible. Offer to do home visits for conferences or other meetings with individual parents. For example, St. Paul Family Learning Center and Concordia Creative Learning Academy charter schools hold bi-monthly Family Nights which start with a potluck dinner and are usually followed by a presentation of student work, discussion of school policies, and/or an outing to a local event such as a baseball game.
Share information with families about their children’s individual progress. There are several strategies schools may use to communicate with families about their children, including parent-student-teacher conferences, phone calls, and written documentation of student achievement. Elementary classrooms may produce newsletters with descriptions of classroom activities, goals, upcoming plans, and recognition of individual students.
Provide information to families and community members about how the school is doing. Families, as well as the broader community (including the sponsor, state officials, the media, and the general public) are interested in how charter schools are doing. While common methods of communicating include annual reports and publication of standardized tests results, charter schools also have the flexibility to use many other communication vehicles. Consider portfolios, public presentations, widely distributed newsletters, and media releases about specific school accomplishments.
Periodically assess family satisfaction through surveys, using the information to improve the school. Successful charter school operators continuously improve their school’s programs and their responsiveness to families and all other major stakeholders. Surveying school stakeholders is a common and relatively inexpensive strategy for obtaining data about how the program is viewed and how to improve your school. (See the Resources section to access sample parent surveys.) The most critical part of assessing satisfaction is using the data to improve the school. Consider specifying measurable and achievable goals for family involvement in the charter school. For example, a measurable and realistic goal statement could be “Our charter school parent volunteers will log over 2,000 hours volunteering for the school during the 2001-2002 school year.” Be sure to tie changes prompted by your data collection to the school’s mission and vision.
Hickman Charter School, a K-8 home-based learning charter in Hickman, California, offers an example of a school driven by parent input. Parents determine curriculum, activities, assessments, on and off-site school classes, web-based classes, field trips, and enrichment experiences. Part of the school learning record is an ongoing parent survey, Hickman’s mechanism to continuously assess and improve its program to meet the needs of its students and families.
IV. Resources
The following link contains a list of useful online resources.
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