Tiphany Kane (Ruppert)

EDAD 566

Journal #5
Baseline Assessment

Objective 1: Getting families involved in planning how they would like to be involved in the
school.
In their research on Latino parent involvement, Jasis, et al, found parental
empowerment in more creative, community based methods would increase parental
involvement. The key is empowerment of our previously marginalized parental population. This
involves processes that reflect on and incorporate socio-cultural, psychological, and ideological
constructs. These processes must be local in nature, community based, involve mutual
respect, critical reflection, caring, and equal share participation. In this way, on oft
marginalized population begins to have greater access and an increased sense of self-efficacy.
Jasis even found that empowering these parents raises their ability to achieve their highest
personal and collective aspirations and goals.
So then, how can we get families more involved in planning how they would like to be

involved at the school? We need to begin by having families be a part of the dialogue. When

teachers and administrators decide how parents should be involved, parent needs and interests

get left behind. The dialogue can be driven by data that already exists as a starting point. These

measures include:

-School Climate Survey (District generated yearly)

- Parent sign-up sheets for BTSN, conferences and Open House

- School specific parent survey of needs

An analysis of the data findings show that only 1.8% of families responded to the School climate

survey. Because of this extremely low response to our climate survey we were unable to get a

clear picture of how parents currently view our school. This climate survey is created and
distributed by the district electronically. Our school site has no control over the distribution of

the survey. Many families do not have access to the internet at home and/or may be confused

about how to participate in the survey. We need to get more families to respond to the School

Climate survey to be able to get a clear picture of how families currently feel about our school

climate. Perhaps having our school administration communicate with the district and let them

know that we would like to coordinate the distribution of the survey. We could open up our

computer lab to parents and have our community liaisons available to help parents through the

electronic survey process.

Conference attendance is at 97% this means that most families attend conferences. The

fact that families make the time and find the transportation to attend conferences lets us know

we have a parent population that cares very much about their childrens education.

BTSN participation is at about 58% and Open House participation is approximately 54%.

While we have a little over half of our families participating, we can work to improve

attendance. We need to find out what keeps the other families from attending. How can we

make BTSN and Open House a valuable experience for all families? In order to find out how we

can make these events more valuable for families our school should create a School Specific

parent survey. Some questions to ask our families:

-What kind of activities, events & community partnerships would be most

helpful?

-How can we make BTSN & Open House more interactive so that more families

attend?
Objective 2: Use parent input regarding their needs to identify and draw in local community

resources.

The advice of many education experts is to shift our parent paradigm from either

expecting all parents to respond the way middle-class parents do. Or thinking that parents

dont care or dont value education when they do not show up at school events. Instead

we need to focus on ways to draw parents into the school and make them feel valued and

welcome. (Henderson, et al, p.115)

Using the information regarding conferences, Open House and BTSN listed above as

starting data, we can utilize these events to engage our families in a more meaningful way.

Beyond the Bake Sale created a list of help families would like from school. This list includes

things like:

Lend books, computers, and other learning materials

Offer after-school programs and workshops on how to help children at home

Hold events at times convenient for working families

Offer child care and transportation

We can use this list to generate a parent survey that helps us to identify the areas of

need for our parents. Once we identify the areas of need and interest, we can bring in

community partners for school events that are of interest and value to our families.

Objective 3: Encourage parents to become a more active part of our education community.

Once we have identified areas of need and are able to create events that meet these

needs and offer value to the families, we should be able to help our parents be more active
members of our educational community. Henderson, et all found some causes of low

involvement. Among these causes are:

Parents with limited English feel intimidated because they often do not

understand what is being communicated and do not feel like they can offer

much to the school.

Parents have trouble helping children at home because they do not understand

how the subject is taught in school.

Possible solutions could be offering parent education events and outreach programs in parents

native languages. For my school location that would be primarily Spanish and Vietnamese.

Parent nights could also be centered around helping parents to understand the new common

core math teaching methods with hands on parent learning opportunities.