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.