PIC Commentary 2 of 2

Susan Roberston, past President of the Ontario Federation of Home & School Associations, lends the following insights into Parent Engagement and Parent Involvement Committees:

Keep fighting the good fight. The PIC is supposed to be a Parent Involvement Committee, not a school council involvement committee. Any identifiable group should be able to attend and be a member of this group, not just H&S members, but also multicultural organizations, settlement workers for newly arrived Canadians for heaven sake – they have something to contribute to the vision of how to involve more parents in supporting schools and kids!

What, does the board want all the H&S members in the board to stop doing any activities in their schools because they are not deemed “important enough parents” to be included in a parent group at the school board level!? They always want the simple approach, but you know what? Parents don’t come in one size fits all packages. The PIC could do a lot of good if it could just recognize and celebrate that one little thing and then use that to build their improving involvement model – lots of little and different things work for different parents, and understanding what the PIC is trying to accomplish might help them see that the more points of view they have at the table, the better it will be.

When it comes to sharing what is working in your schools, you might want to talk about the gift that can happen when you have two groups of parents sharing the ideas, work load and “involvement” initiatives in your schools – a school council and a Home and School. You might talk about how a separate parent group that organizes activities that the parents think will improve the school and community, especially one that can offer parents the chance to speak up about issues in the health, safety and education of all children in Ontario is a great model (never mind the idea that OFHSA membership gives parents opportunities to network across the province and attend workshops, access training and get help when they need it). What everyone needs, however, is more ideas and expertise in getting to the ones who are not involved now, and that takes a lot more thought and taking chances than has currently been envisioned. What about ideas that parents can access themselves, without attending meetings or being members of a group? Can this be set up and could numbers of parents who take advantage of these services be tracked somehow to see if it improves their engagement with public education?

Share what is working very well in your school – can you point to a specific number of parents who are involved in some way at Morden? What percentage of the parent population is that? What parent groups can be identified at Morden that are not involved in any way? What would they maybe need to be involved? What would that look like? Can you actually track an increasing percentage of families involved in some way over the year? What type of involvement are we trying to increase and to what end? These are all important questions for the PIC if it is to be a meaningful exercise and not just another board committee that pays lip service to parent involvement. I would try for real numbers and classification re type of parent involvement with targets set for what is important, doable and how it will be measured, including the number of parents who come to parent teacher interviews and a response from parents about how well that works for them – tough questions, but they would maybe elicit more parent response if that is a genuine goal!

Enough. Just some of my current frustration with one size solutions that don’t actually ask the right questions before they get to answers. I see the PIC as a research and tracking body that is meant to increase the engagement of all parents, not a meeting of school council chairs that is used by the board to pay lip service. This PIC has the potential to really examine, collect information, and then train parents and staff about improving the way we talk to parents. That is worth the money the ministry is putting into this in my oh so humble opinion!

Sue

PIC Commentary 1 of 2

The Halton DSB is holding it’s third Parent Involment Committee Meeting this Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 7:00 PM in the Banquet Hall at the Milton Sports Centre on Derry Road.

The agenda has been set as follows:

• Review of Key Features of the Parent Involvement in Education Policy
• Facilitated Discussion: Who should be a member of the Regional PIC?
• How should these individuals be selected?
• Brainstorm: Ideas for Terms of Reference for the Regional PIC

Susan Roberston, past President of the Ontario Federation of Home & School Associations, lends the following insights into Parent Engagement and Parent Involvement Committees:

Membership: a representative chosen by the Home and School Council should be there as a full voting member of the PIC to represent a body of involved parents in schools across the board – that rep can liaise with the H&SA members as well as offer their input. I also wonder if there has been any discussion about each Home and School Association also having a voice at the PIC since the PIC’s mandate is to monitor all parent involvement, not just that happening under the umbrella of the school council.

Under the first item, discussion of the new Parent Engagement Policy (Board’s or Province’s?), it should be made clear at this meeting that all parent initiated activities are to be included under the guidelines for board and provincial funding. The policy says that all funded projects must be approved by a motion of the school council, but school councils have the responsibility to seek out and support activities recommended and organized by other community and school parent groups other than the school councils. The PIC should also be monitoring all parent activities as part of its mandate to report on parent involvement, not just those organized by school councils. I think they also need to look at what activities actually are bringing in parents in support of public education. Are the most effective programs ones that parents need to apply for funds for or are they simpler than that? School based activities that don’t require funding applications form an important component of parent engagement already, and these shouldn’t now be considered “chopped liver” because they don’t require funding applications. I am thinking of a host of community building activities that make supporters for public schools out of the schools’ communities – fun fairs, information nights, family math and literacy nights, kindergarten parent nights, and all the times that parents are made to feel part of their school community. These softer items often have a bigger impact than asking people to be involved in improving student achievement in the school or discussing EQAO results for the school.

If the PIC wants to have a big impact on increasing parent engagement, it could find ways to help the parents already engaged reach out to parents not already there – especially in helping them find ways for these uninvolved parents to support their own child’s learning. Having more parents attend meetings probably is a worthwhile goal, but some real expertise in learning what parents need to know to help their students do better and then helping all parents already active in schools get these messages out there in their own communities would be wonderful. Most of us don’t know how to reach out to the parents who aren’t coming in the door, and we aren’t even sure what those parents most need to understand to improve their children’s results. The PIC could really help schools if this kind of information could be researched and then disseminated there.

I am seeing a lot of attention to “what projects can be funded” instead of “what projects actually work to help parents help their kids”.

 Sue