Parents or Not?

Parents in school or not? That is a question that every educator has to answer. The problem comes when the school/principal/teacher thinks that parent involvement stops at the front door to the school. Yet that is where parents can have a higher impact on students today than ever before.

It is time for schools to understand that parents are the great equalizer in education. Money does not get the results that everyone thinks it should. Rather, the results show that throwing money at the problem usually just makes the problem more expensive.

Time to try something new.

At the high school my children have attended, parents have become an important part of what happens there. In Utah, by law there is a school community council at every school. And every SCC has to have at least two more parents than employees as members. And it is the SCC that is responsible for the school improvement plan each year.

So, at West High, we start writing our school improvement plan, which is sent to the school board in April, in September. Why? Because it takes all year to watch what happens with this year's plan and start doing the research on the next year.

And it is the parents that do the research. Anyone can bring an idea to the SCC and then we talk about it. If there is interest, and there usually is, then we form a small committee to do the basic research. That committee can be as small as one person. And usually that one person is a parent who is interested in learning more about something. They go out, do the research, and bring it back to the committee.

When the project gets back to the SCC, we talk about what has been learned and what that means to the school. Then we decide if there is enough interest to keep going. More people may get involved at this point, and we start to look for teachers to get involved in the project. At this time we are starting to wonder about implementation of whatever it is. That is why we want teachers to start to get involved.

If there is still interest after this stage, we start to look at funding. In Utah, by law, a portion of the school's budget is given to the SCC to determine its use. This is soft money, so anything we use it for needs to be something that can be replaced with a general budget later. This is money to be used for testing things out or for one time expenses.

What are the results? Some of our best projects that have an impact on students have come through this process. Why? Because our teachers believe that our parents are more important to the education of their students that just making sure they get to school on time and turn in their homework. It took us a while to get there, but it works. Now, the teachers expect a certain level of leadership to come from the parents and the parents are involved in the real workings of the school. And they are often the most innovative of the bunch.

And that is what makes a Choice School.

School Choice or Choice Schools?

I keep hearing about School Choice and how important it is for families to be able to choose where the kids go to school. What that means is...I want my choice for schools and I don't really care about your choice unless it matches my choice.

My wife and I made our choice for schools. We decided that public schools would be the best for our kids. More importantly, we decided that we needed to make our schools CHOICE SCHOOLS. Not just for our kids, but for all the students at the school.

What is a choice school? A place where the student and teacher both feel safe in sharing an exploration of learning. Where a teacher is able to use their strengths to help students gain the same love of learning that brought them to teaching in the first place. And where the student feels safe to discover who they are and what they are passionate about.

Choice Schools are all about learning. And that means all the stakeholders are learning, not just the students. For example...

Students learn about themselves and what they want to do and why they want to do it. They learn how to learn.

Teachers learn how to be better at what they already do well...Teaching students to love learning just like they do.

Parents learn how to support their student in their pursuit of learning and how to keep learning themselves.

Administrators learn how to encourage all the other groups to continue learning as they learn to help others learn.

Why all the emphasis on learning? Because life is all about learning. When you stop learning, you just stop. And when you stop, you may never start again.

So what is a Choice School? A safe place to learn. For everyone. And who makes it a Choice School? Everyone.

In the future I will be writing about what I learn about schools and the present and future of education. I invite ideas here because that is how we all learn...by sharing.

Thanks for reading...I hope you learn something.

Steve Asay