Creative parent engagement strategies used by four charter schools
Harambee Charter School
One of the oldest charters in the city, Harambee – a 500-student K-8 school with an African-centered curriculum – uses a carrot and stick approach to keep parents involved.
On the “carrot” side, the president of the PTA is part of the administrative team and sits in on weekly meetings that chart the direction of the school. Some parents are also invited to the annual staff retreats held in Maryland, said Deborah Toney-Moore, the PTA president. Two parents serve on the board.
The school building is open nights and weekends for community use. Harambee’s sister high school, Imhotep in West Oak Lane, operates a “communiversity” one Saturday a month, with workshops for parents and extra academic help for students. At Harambee, she said, teachers must keep in close touch with parents and are issued cell phones for that purpose.
On the “stick” side, Harambee has mandatory monthly meetings for parents, which generally take the form of workshops on such subjects as how to deal with stress, how to understand standardized test results, and different learning styles. Repeated failure to attend, said Toney-Moore, can lead the school to ask the family not to return for the following year. But that rarely happens, she said. She said meetings generally draw 250 to 300 people.
Independence Charter School
This charter school was literally birthed by parents chatting at the playground, and today parents dominate its Board of Directors and are involved in all aspects of the school. “It’s not a requirement [that parents be on the board] but it’s an indication of the level of involvement,” said Jurate Krokys, the CEO.
The school publishes a monthly parent newsletter and periodically invites parents to have tea with the principal and observe in classrooms. While it doesn’t require parents to volunteer a certain number of hours, it asks teachers to be constantly recruiting for different tasks.
“I tell teachers that if you have a parent not coming to conferences or a family where involvement is not great, you should see that as a wonderful challenge for you, how to get 100 percent to come in,” Krokys said.
Independence attracts a particular type of parent by offering a Spanish-immersion program, in which English-speaking children take all their subjects in Spanish as a way to learn the language. Yet, its student body is diverse – 64 percent African American, 20 percent White, 13 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent Asian. About half the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch – fairly low for a Philadelphia public school.
Krokys acknowledges that the parents on the governing board are middle-class professionals. “The board represents different racial groups, but not economic diversity,” she said. “We actually have discussed that this is something we need to address.”
Wissahickon Charter School
This charter school, with an environmental theme, was also largely founded by a group of activist parents and serves a diverse population. In addition to having a parent outreach coordinator, it holds an annual event honoring their volunteer service. “The recognition night, we try to make it a snazzy event,” said CEO Julie Stapleton-Carroll. “Our goal is to get parents involved in their child’s education, because that’s the number one predictor of academic success.
So the school defines involvement very broadly, creating a checklist with 46 different tasks – nine that can be done in the classroom, 14 at home and 23 in the school. “Not everyone is comfortable coming on a field trip, Stapleton-Carroll said. “So if they are just helping their children with their homework, we consider that important as well because that is also helping the whole school.” The recognized tasks range from coming to a classroom performance to reading with their children to attending a board meeting to doing carpentry or gardening.
The school also set up a parent center, a small room equipped with two computers, a couch, a TV, a copier, books and magazines. Parents can hang out there, search the Internet for jobs, or use it as a base of operations for work in the school. Among many school events is “Wissahickon Reads,” in which everyone – parents, staffers and students –_reads the same book and gets together to discuss it.
FACTS Charter School
Sometimes, the school’s theme complicates parent outreach efforts. The Folk Arts – Cultural Treasures Charter School (FACTS) in Chinatown has a parent base that speaks a multitude of languages.
“A very basic thing is communication,” said Ellen Somekawa, president of Asian Americans United and one of the school’s founders, who also has a son in the school. “There is a massive effort in translating the communications that go home to the parents.”
Neeta Patel, the school’s operations officer, said the 336 students are drawn from all over the city, with 61 percent Asian American, 33 percent African American, 5 percent Latino and 3 percent White. Among the Asian groups, students speak several dialects of Chinese, as well as Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Indonesian. About a third of the families speak no English at all at home.
As a result, the school has put great effort into obtaining simultaneous translation equipment for parents, subscribing to translation services and hiring bilingual staff members.
Because it has focused so intently on communication, Somekawa said, the school, starting its second year, is still setting up its parent volunteer program. It does run activities like potlucks, in which different ethnic groups can show off their cooking. Next year, two parents will serve on the Board of Trustees.
–Dale Mezzacappa