>> anna hinton: welcome to the first installmentin our series entitled “achieving excellence and innovation in family, school, and communityengagement.†i’d first like to thank our partners, the united way worldwide, the nationalpta and the pirc technical assistance providers, the southwest educational development laband the harvard family research project for partnering with us in this effort. our goalwith this entire series is really to raise awareness around the need to create familyengagement – around the need to create a family engagement system that is really viewedin terms of its importance on the same level of other systems in education, for example,like assessment in accountability systems. however, the purpose of this first webinaris really to begin conversations around changing
the way that we think about doing this workand reframing our approach to family engagement. so this first webinar will really seek tolay the foundation for how to create integrated, systemic and sustained family engagement systems.we hope to provide real-life examples of what it means to have an integrated family engagementsystem that’s really linked to learning and aligned with academic targets or instructionalgoals. we want to talk about in-depth what it means to have a systemic family engagementstrategy where state district and school policies, plans and then family engagement strategiesare really aligned to creating a cradle-to-career family engagement pathway and finally, whatit means to have a sustained family engagement strategy with an infrastructure and dedicatedstaff to implementing the strategy. so our
presenters for today really contribute tothis understanding and to help to lay the foundation for this reframing beginning withjim shelton, assistant deputy secretary here in the office of innovation and improvementat the us department of education. jim will provide some opening remarks and a contextfor how family engagement fits within the department’s four areas of reform. followedby jim’s presentation, i will talk a little bit about key definitions and specifics asit relates to what we mean by this reframing, if you will. heather weiss, founder and directorof the harvard family research project will follow my presentation with the discussionof the use of data to support family, school, and community engagement. nina sazer o’donnell,vice president of education at the united
way worldwide will talk about the united way’sefforts to help communities, schools and families promote student learning and finally, we willconclude with a presentation from ron mirr of the iowa state pirc and rm consulting.he is joined by jaynette rittman, an elementary school principal who will discuss family engagementstrategies implemented at her school that really fits this framework. so with that,i will turn it over to jim shelton for remarks. >> jim shelton: good afternoon. first, i wantto reiterate the thanks to all of our partners. i won’t name them all but we think it’sa critical opportunity for us to actually change the dialogue around family engagement,raise it to the level of importance that it ought to have and make sure that we are sharingthe best of the field in terms of what we
know about what can be effective. the webinarseries is going to focus over time around a number of issues. in particular, we’retrying to make sure that we reframe the role of parent engagement – actually not to reframeand this is something that you as people in the field know very well. the parents havea variety of roles whether it’s as partners in learning where we’re better enablingparents to support their children’s learning at home and at school and making sure thatwe’re following the research. there’s just various ways in which parents could playvery effective roles in that. parents as decision-makers making right choices about the pathways thattheir students take, the schools that their children attend and even the teachers thatthey are allowing the students to be in the
classroom with and then obviously, parentsas advisers and advocates making sure that they are involved in the decision-making impactingtheir schools, making sure they’re aware of the policies that impact their childrenas students and then affect the school communities in which they have the opportunity to go toschool. what this means is that the way that our various systems think about family engagementneeds to make sure that it emphasizes several key principles. it needs to be purposeful.it needs to be datadriven. it needs to be ultimately linked to how students actuallyachieve academically and how we actually support learning in the classroom. it needs to beresponsive in terms of responding to the concerns of parents and it needs to really honor theparent’s contributions and not be condescending
in the least form. then obviously, it hasto support family and [communities] on how they actually organize to hold low-performingschools accountable. unfortunately, many of the interactions that our families and parentshave today are just based on the fact that they are actually having to deal with theschool because of a systemic failure and that’s something that we have to empower them todo in a much more effective way. the webinar series, the “achieving excellence and innovationin family, school, and community engagement†webinar series is an opportunity for all thestakeholders to learn about family, school and community engagement research, best practicesfrom the field and new innovations that are making a difference in school improvementand in student learning. the leading practitioners
that have agreed to participate whether theybe policymakers or researchers or people who are actually doing the work day-to-day willbe sharing real-life examples from the field about what it takes to do this work effectively.[audio gap] has created an incredible opportunity to transform education in this country. you’veheard about it in a lot of different forms but mostly, you’ve heard about it impactingthe four critical reform areas plus this notion of overall thrust on innovative approaches.let me just take the four things apart and talk about how families fit into them justvery briefly. data systems, it’s very important to family engagement that we actually allowinformation to be transparent so that parents have accessible, comprehensible and actionableinformation about how their children are doing,
about the resources and performance of theschools that their children attend and about other roles and activities that they shouldand have the ability to access to they influence governments and the accountability of theschools. those data systems are the ways in which parents are going to be able to understandwhether and how their schools are performing and whether they’re serving their childrenwell. it’s the first step in empowering parents. second, obviously, everyone wantsto make sure - every parent’s first desire is to make sure that the teacher, the educatorin the classroom in leading the school actually is the most effective possible that they aretrained to deliver well for their child. that they’re trained and able – not only trainedbut able to actually deliver learning and
opportunities for significant exposure anddevelopmental gains for their child, basically growth and then obviously that the classroomis a place that not only the child is welcome but the parent feels welcome and that again,in partnering in that work around being a partner in learning that they have somebodythat they could talk to to understand how to be most effective. that’s not somethingthat happens by accident. obviously, teachers and leaders need to be supported in theirefforts to learn how you actually engage families, parents in particular effectively and that’ssomething that we have to understand how we leverage the resources that we have to accomplishmore effectively than we have in the past. i’ve talked about the lowest-performingschools in particular. those schools that
we know that for decades in some cases havebeen underperforming. many parents have gone through schools and then knowing that theywere underserved by them and then they’re watching their children go to those same schools.we have to give the chance, the voice in actually improving those schools and demanding opportunitiesfor changes, opportunities for advancement for their children beyond what they may haveexperienced themselves. then obviously, with all the talk around raising standards andhaving new and better assessments that get away from a bubble test but actually startto assess what children know and are able to do in ways that are much more effective,much more innovative that allows us to understand if they are getting the critical thinkingin other skills that we want them to have
beyond just rote knowledge. those are thingsthat we can easily get caught up in targeting as educators and as professionals servingin the education space and we have to make all of that information accessible so thatit’s very easy for parents to understand whether or not their child is on the trackto the kind of aspirations that they have for them around college and career, makingthose things transparent, translating it into ways in which the parents can engage in theclassroom with their teachers, those things are critically important. those are the mostimportant things i think that i have to share with you today. i will quickly want to turnit over to the rest of the panelists but before i do it, we know that we actually are lackinggood information around family engagement.
it’s one of the things that makes it hardto put on top of the agenda because this is something that everyone instinctively knowsis important but we haven’t actually tracked the data in a way that it allows us to makea clear argument about what are the indicators of success for family engagement and how doyou know that it’s ultimately resulting in better outcomes for student. what is theevidence around the most effective ways to engage families and how do we actually adaptthat for the different communities and especially the different school circumstances that theyface. how do those translate into best practices and how do you actually ensure that peoplewhen they implement those practices are doing it with the know-how to do it effectivelyand with fidelity and then finally, the thing
i talked about most is the lead educatorswhether they be classroom teachers or leaders of schools, how are we training them to actuallyimplement these strategies to perform and behave frankly in a way that actually supportsthis kind of vision of family engagement. with all of that, i know that the paneliststoday are going to be qualified to start to answer those questions and we appreciate everyonewho’s shown up today to share and to learn. bye-bye. >> anna hinton: thanks, jim. so jim has reallylaid out challenges that we must address as a field in order to be successful in thiswork and these challenges really force us to think differently about what we’re doingto engage families, schools and communities
and essentially, this is what this reframingis all about, changing the way that we define family engagement, our beliefs about familyengagement and just basically how we do family engagement. so in taking a step back givenwhat we need to change – given the fact that we want to focus on reframing the conversationaround how we do business, we need to talk about what is the goal? what is the goal forreframing? what is the goal in our work with parents and our work with schools, schoolstaff, teachers and principals, district staff. just what are aiming towards and so we’veidentified a twofold goal, if you will. the first is to ensure that all families haveaccess to information they need to effectively support their children’s education fromcradle to career and so when you look at this
goal, it appears to be narrow and focusedfor what we want for parents but it’s not really – it’s a starting point for thereframing conversation. so we’re starting here because we want to make sure that everythingwe do around family engagement is purposeful and is driven by data, driven by school dataor student performance data and so the second part of that goal is to ensure that schoolsand districts have the infrastructure and capacity to develop systemic family and communityengagement strategies that are aligned with instructional goals. this essentially meansthat we provide our school and district personnel with the needed professional development andtechnical assistance to better enable them to create systemic family engagement pathwaysand strategies. so considering the goal that
we’ve just talked about and what the researchsays about family engagement, we know that from cradle to career, effective family engagementis not a one-time program. it is not an add-on service or choice of a good school but rathera set of day-to-day purposeful practices, attitudes, belief and interactions which supportlearning at home as well as at school, during afterschool activities and during the summer.so what we’re really talking about here is moving away from random acts of familyengagement, random acts of family engagement that we cannot tie back to or link to schooldata that may just be moving away from a focus on math night or a spaghetti dinner just tosee how many parents we can get out at the school. so this reframing is really aboutpurposely creating strategies that are data
driven and are linked to learning. additionally,new evidence about family engagement finds that school improvement requires systemicwork on multiple fronts. parents and community involvement in a recent study has been consideredto be one of the key essential supports to turning around low-performing schools so whenyou have systemic and sustained family engagement coupled with efforts to transform schoolsand to educate students, it leads to better pathways for graduation in college. so we’vetalked a lot about what family engagement is not. now, i want to turn our attentionto discussing what is effective family engagement, what are the components of an effective familyengagement strategy and the first is is that it’s really a shared responsibility. it’sco-constructed by the family, the school and
the community. it’s a shared responsibilityin which the school and other community organizations are committed to reaching out to engage familiesin a meaningful way but the second part of that is that families are also committed toactively supporting their children’s learning and development. the second part of this definitionis that family engagement is continuous across a child’s life from cradle to career. itbegins in early childhood. it doesn’t just stop there and it continues throughout collegeand career development. finally, effective family engagement is really enforced, everywhere,learning takes place. family engagement is carried out at home and in the community.so given this definition, we’re no longer talking about – we’re no longer just concernedwith getting parents in the school building
but rather, we’re more interested in ensuringthat everyone, family, school and communities are all committed to this work and that it’scontinuous from birth through college in that it can really take place in all settings sonot just in the school building. so how do you create an integrated systemic and sustainedfamily and community engagement strategy? that’s really what we’re talking aboutin terms of this reframing of family engagement and what does it look like? so we’ve outlined,at a minimum, things to consider when trying to create an integrated systemic and sustainedfamily engagement and the first is really the creation of systemic policies and plansand strategies at the state, district and school level from cradle to career that reallydo create a family engagement pathway. the
second is having dedicated staff and again,at the state, district and school level for family, school and community engagement tosupport the creation of an infrastructure for family engagement that can be sustainedand really institutionalized. the third is focusing on capacity-building at all levelsagain, the state, district and school level to support the development, implementationand assessment of systemic family, school and community engagement. few teacher preparationprograms include instruction on how to partner with parents and the community to improvestudent achievement so this is definitely a need. all school staff and administratorsneed guidance to professional development and technical assistance on how to carry outfamily engagement in the way that we’re
talking about and also to ensure that it’saligned with the instructional goals. the fourth thing is really focusing on makingindividual and school performance data accessible, understandable and actionable - doing theengagement with the instruction and school improvement goals and we’ve talked a littlebit about that before. this will also enable informed high quality public school choiceoptions, guide parent-teacher conferences and otherwise, just enable families to supporttheir children’s learning and play their role in the school governance process. sothat’s the importance of making sure that we have transparent data systems. the fifththing is accountability for family, school and community engagement at the state, districtand school level. and six, create incentives
to develop and test innovative approachesto build best practices from cradle to career and ongoing dissemination on these practicesto support innovation and continuous improvement. so when you take a look at these – withthese considerations, they may seem complex but they’re really quite doable and whilei’m sure that there are many places that are doing some of what we’re talking aboutin terms of this reframing, i do want to talk about two places in particular. that’s justan example and there are two different examples and that’s why i’m highlighting them.the first is the boston public school district. so this is an example of a multitiered systemof family engagement. it’s highly structured so much so that there’s an assistant superintendentof family and student engagement to assist
a superintendent and this really helps toensure that family engagement is seen as an integral component of the district’s blueprintfor school reform and that it’s not considered or seen as an add-on initiative and that it’snot really related to student achievement or other school improvement efforts. thisoffice is responsible for coordinating both district and school-level engagement strategiesand not necessarily for directing the school’s family engagement efforts. the office’srole is essentially to build a district’s capacity to support the schools in conductingtheir own family engagement work. all of the district’s family engagement strategiesare aligned with academic target again, to ensure that it’s not an addon and that it’snot a special program that’s not connected
with the instructional practices or studentlearning. the interesting approach that boston – the interesting thing about boston’sapproach is that they really do market family engagement as a strategy for improving studentoutcomes through increased attendance, decreased suspension rates and other indicators thatare clearly linked to student achievement and so they recognize the difficulty in creatinga direct causal link between [audio gap] family engagement and the student achievement andinstead market family engagement around these outcomes. the district also has other familyengagement strategies, sort of geared towards conducting outreach to parents and conductingworkshops but essentially, this is just one example. the other example which is my finalexample is the boston public school system
– i’m sorry, which is the federal way,washington. they have an office of one staff and they also use parents as outreach to pullin parents to try to help that - they use the parents to help with their engagementstrategies. i want to speed ahead a bit and talk a little bit about the reframing of familyengagement. i just want to quickly go over what the points that i’ve mentioned earlierare in terms of what this reframing is really all about; moving from an individual parentto a teacher’s “job†to a shared responsibility, moving from random acts to a systemic approach,from events to results-driven, from add-on services to purposeful connections, from complianceto focus driven and from limited data to a transparent data system. so we do have a pollingquestion that i would like for you all to
consider as i prepare to turn over to heatherweiss who will talk about data and using data to inform our family engagement strategies. >> heather weiss: good afternoon, everyone.heather weiss. my goal in this presentation is to try to get you excited about data, toprovide some examples of places that are using data in the ways that jim and anna suggestedand to whet your opportunity to learn more. the third webinar in this series in fact isgoing to focus on how we increase data use as a key element of effective family and communityengagement strategies. i think right now, we’re in an incredible position to leveragethe investments in data that are being made nationally. the estimate is we put $1 billionin now to build data systems and we’re on
track to spend $1 billion more. the data qualitycampaign estimates that by 2011, all states will have longitudinal data systems that trackperformance from year to year and as you’ve heard, there’s a high priority at the departmentin getting and using data to support education improvement. having said that, as my nextslide will suggest, at this point, we’re not routinely using data in ways that buildand support effective family engagement. so we are not at a point where we’re givingfamilies understandable data about their child’s performance – hello? >> jaque minow: you’re fine, heather. >> heather weiss: okay, sorry. we’re notat a point where we’re giving families understandable
data and actionable data. they’re not gettingdata on the school’s performance in ways that enable them to work with the school effectivelyto embed family engagement and that’s a key part of the school’s overall changeand transformation strategy and data are not routinely used to inform database to parent-teacherconferences. having said that, we are really at a point i think of opportunity where thenational investment in data really provides an unprecedented opportunity to innovate andprovide accessible, understandable and actionable performance data that’s going to keep kidson the pathway to college and career. i want to talk about a couple of places and a coupleof design principles, if you will, that are informing the development of smarter datasystems that i would turn your attention to
where the education sector is doing it inan ongoing way nationally around data use and they’re encouraging the movement frominstructional to learner-centered data systems that focus on actionable data that teachers,families, students and after-school programs and others can use on a day-to-day basis tosupport kids’ improvement and staying on the pathway to graduation and to college readinesscareers. they’re also encouraging systems where data flow across institutions all ofthe partners that i just described and the creation of information and tools that supportday-to-day practices of data use and provide information about ways that students, teachers,families, after-school providers can work with students to improve their performance.so we’re beginning to develop data systems
based on those kinds of principles that createhuge opportunities for family and community engagement. i want to briefly describe threereally interesting efforts. we don’t, at this point in time, have full cradle-to-careerdata systems. it’s an aspiration of goal but we do have good illustrations of innovationgoing along the way. as my next slide suggests there are innovative efforts in early childhood,in middle and also in high school and the three that i would point you to and thereare links so that you can follow up, those of you that are interested to learn more aboutthese things are save the children’s early steps for school success and two programsthat are going on in new york city. with respect to the early childhood work that is beingdone to save the children in multisites around
the country, what they provide are individualplans for the child and then a portfolio of the child’s work. they provide regular feedbackon the child’s development every two months with ideas about how parents can support thechild’s development. parents then take that portfolio to pre-k as introduction to themand to their child for the teacher and by this point, the parents have learned how topartner with the teacher or the home visitor or early childhood provider and have the expectationthat they will have data-driven discussions with the teacher and get regular informationon the child’s performance and what they can do to support it. so i encourage you totake a look at what save is doing with regard to this. i think some of the most interestingwork that’s going on around data use in
the country is being done in the k-20 systemin new york city by the new york city aris parent link system and new visions 9th gradeparent involvement and college readiness. both of these efforts are piloting and learningfrom substantial outreach efforts to engage low-income schools and families in gettingand using data to support their child learning in and out of school. each provides attendanceand select performance data to families on a regular basis and i think their experiencehas a number of lessons for us as we try to design these. now, my next slide really laysout what new visions is doing in new york and i had to warn everybody that i think iwin this prize hands down for the worst powerpoint slide in the whole deck in this webinar buti’m putting it up here to really whet your
appetite to go to the new visions websiteand also to look at a case that we’ll be posting up on the harvard family researchproject website next week that goes indepth in what new visions is doing. i’ve chosena new visions example because they have integrated, accessible understandable and actionable performancedata into the core of their work to get kids to graduate from high school and to be collegeready. they’re focusing their parent engagement efforts on the 9th grade students and familiesbecause that’s a key point because kids tend to drop out shortly thereafter so they’rereally focusing on that 9th grade period. they believe that at home, parents need tobe able to monitor the academic progress of their child as well as to access to in-schooland communitylevel resources to help each
student meet his or her academic goals. theyalso believe schools need to develop a capacity to provide families with timely action-orientedstudent performance data and that includes information on how the child is progressingtoward graduation and post-secondary education benchmarks as well as grades, attendance,homework, assignments. for this to happen, teachers and other school staff need to clearlycommunicate academic expectations and post-secondary education goals and provide parents with regulardata on a regular basis. so you see in terms of this slide with their theory of changehow central parents and teachers are together to 9th grade students’ success. on the lowerleft hand side, you see how they’re building school capacity and on the lower right handside, you’ll see some of the things they’re
doing and some of the tools and informationthey’re providing for parents that will give them the regular information about whatschools expect in their young person’s performance on key measures. now, the next slide is oneof the tools that new visions has provided and you see in this tool first of all, it’scolor coded. a parent can see immediately the child’s progress. green is obviouslygood. yellow is warning. red is we’ve got some real problems here. they put up key leadingindicators for credits accumulated on the left, attendance data and then the young person’sprogress on the new york state region. then if you go to the next page, what they alsodo is then key in, as you can see on the lower right, things that need to happen in orderfor the young person to stay on track. so
in this case, this young person needs someadditional support, credit recovery assistance, opportunities to go to after-school tutoringand perhaps an after-school program in order to get some remedial help so that they canstay on the pathway to college and career readiness. so i put this up because this isthe kind of tools that are being developed around the country. you’ll shortly be hearingfrom nina about work that united way is doing with at&t’s support and in nevada, thereis an opportunity or a community there where the pirc, the united way and the school aredeveloping something that is not dissimilar to what new visions is doing in new york sothis kind of idea about how we put together data to support this [audio gap] travel acrossthe country and have organizations like united
way pick it up. i think we’re in the earlystage of this effort and there’s a set of lessons that are emerging particularly fromthe new york work and then i think will be emerging from other places as we proceed inthese kinds of innovations. lessons i see are the importance of principal leadershipand commitment to using data, the importance of involving families and helping to designthese tools and design ways that they’re going to be engaged around data in supportof keeping their young person on the pathway. i think it requires dedicated district staffand school staff in new york. the parent coordinators in each school have been central in engagingparents around this data in an ongoing way. i think it requires the development of toolssuch as we see visions has done to make data
accessible and understandable and actionableand i think it involves training the teachers and parents to have data-driven discussionsat parent, teacher and student conferences and elsewhere. finally, as i look at someof these samples that are going on in new york, what is happening is as people beginto integrate the family engagement and data use into the core of their reform strategiesand has a catalytic effect, they’re beginning to see many other ways that they can engagefamilies to keep on track. so i encourage you to continue to track some of the workthat’s going on [audio gap] because i think that some of [audio gap] that we got in thefamily and community engagement arena. so with that, i’d like to ask the poll question:has your school or district taken steps to
make student data accessible, understandableand actionable so families can use it to help support their children’s academic success? >> jaque minow: everybody can go ahead andanswer the poll question. we’ll broadcast the results [audio gap]. >> heather weiss: i would like to turn itover now to nina. >> nina sazer o’donnell: thank you, heather.some of you may know and some of you may not know but united way set out some very ambitiousgoals to work with partners at national, state and local levels to accomplish needed improvementsin education, income and health. in education, united way challenged our entire system acrossthe country to work with their partners to
cut the dropout rate in half by 2018 and weknow that in order to do that, community efforts must be systemic. they must look at entiresystems, not just one system so the efforts must include schools, communities, publicpolicy and very importantly, families that systems and community work at the local leveland at the state level and at the federal level working in sync building off each other’sefforts and well-coordinated and they must be sustainable which means really two things,that there must be an eye for how to continue and scale up sound practices that are yieldingresults and that we must provide strong support to children and families from birth throughadulthood as one of the most important strategies. united way worldwide also set a cradle-to-careeragenda because we know if we’re going to
have any success with achieving our goal,we really have to focus on children from when they’re born until when they’re successfullylaunched as independent, financially-stable adult. so in order to do that, we need tomake sure that children and their families [access] the community support resources neededto assure that their children are [striving] and successful in school, work and life andso in order to accomplish that, we organized our education work into five focus areas.we’re encouraging united way to work with their partners in communities all over thecountry on making sure that kids are ready to succeed when they get to school, makingsure that they can read proficiently in the 4th grade and making sure that they make successfultransitions into from grade to grade and out
of middle school that they graduate from highschool on time ideally and that they actually complete a post-secondary college or trainingof some sort. we know united way, as all the previous presentors have said, that it takespartnership across multiple sectors and prayers for children to succeed through that trajectory.it requires supportive communities, effective schools and strong families and i think thelogic model that heather just shared with us illustrates this in another way that thesuccess for children and education has to be a shared responsibility with schools, communitiesand their family. we believe absolutely and as the [third] research really shows thatparents really are the most important teachers in their children’s lives across the lifespan or across their childhood and youthhood
and experience also tells us and researchtells us that families want the best for their children. they want their children to be successful.they need knowledge and tools to do that throughout their children’s learning career. the unitedway has been changing their focus a bit and we have quite a number of assets to buildon to bring to this work with our partners and again, our partners at all levels. sowe are a national network. we are 1,300 united ways around the country with demonstratedsuccess localizing communities change lives, have this diverse array of national, stateand local partners who provide knowledge, expertise, resources and tools for changeand we have the ability to engage effort, engaging both individual and the organizations[tapping] into champions, make things happen.
united way has unparalleled network of volunteers,more than 11 million community and business leaders and more than 500,000 workplaces [audiogap] of [audio gap] work who want to do more than write a check so please get ready tomarshal those resources towards helping to succeed and helping parents -[that happens]with their kids. united way has a long history in early education and has done some workon family engagement around school readiness. fortunately, at&t under their aspiring initiativealso has a strong commitment to ensuring that students graduate from high school and inpartnership with the harvard family research project. we are working to develop familyengagement strategies [specific] to high school students at risk of dropping out or not graduatingbut starting with an outcome-focused planning
process in each of the fifteen communitiesthe outcome of which is to develop community-wide research-based family engagement plans specificto families of high school students and these plans are due in late may. they need to beparticipatory, exclusive partnerships with community based groups in schools. they needto focus on students at risk for drop out and their families and students and familiesare engaged in the planning process for this work. we’ve also brought national expertiseto the table and then to harvard family research project to make sure that we’re doing thiswork in alignment with current research. then each time they had to [pool] and analyze thedata in their own community and we’ve been doing evaluation in this project from thebeginning knowing that there isn’t a lot
of good data. we want to contribute to a betterdata set so local evaluators are documenting the tracking progress in each community strategizing.so they’ve been school and community partners. it’s defining that this school populationthat they hope to assess, they’ve been aligning and identifying student, family, school andcommunity outcomes. they’ve been connecting outcomes and strategies and gathering baselinedata. in addition, we’ve been operating a learning community with the sites to helpshare what’s being done in ways that will lead to shared learnings with whole unitedway system so that we [audio gap] this work nationwide very quickly. we know that unitedway can really help communities, schools and families. we are thrilled to be in this workbecause we know it’s essential to students
succeeding, to families being financiallystable and healthy with [true] to our mission and we are thrilled to partner with the partnerson this call and with probably many of you out there listening in so have you move forwardin your family engagement when you’re [audio gap], please remember if united way isn’tyour [unintelligible], invite them in and with that, i’m going to turn it over toron mirr and he’s going to talk about the iowa state pirc. >> ron mirr: hi, this is ron and i’m fromiowa and as she said, i’m part of the iowa parent information resource center or pircand i’ve been part of the pirc in iowa since 1995 or 1994, excuse me, and the pircs arefederally-funded projects funded by the u.s.
department of education and if you could havevisited in iowa in 1995 and looked at what we did and if you came today, i think youwould see that we’ve grown enormously in our efforts and we’ve really learned a lot.it had become much more sophisticated in our approach. when we started in 1995, this wholeidea of parent engagement in school was really just starting to take shape and we didn’thave a lot of resources and we decided that we were going to be capacity builders. sowe targeted schools and what we wanted to do was work with teachers and help them workwith parents and are phrased with: how could help parents be more engaged in their children’slearning and because there weren’t a lot of resources available, we had to developour own, we created our own process. there
were some things out there but they rapidlystarted to grow and we had our big reframe in 2002 and that really came about as a resultof the publication called “new wave of evidence.†it’s a sedl publication and it was writtenby anne henderson and karen mapp and in that document, they really looked through all ofthe research that said here’s the effect of parents and schools working together andwhat it means and they made nine recommendations. we thought very long and hard about theseand we used these recommendations that were based in the best research at that time tocreate a framework for how we thought about parent engagement and so we evolved from ourinitial strategy of targeting schools, primarily targeting teachers and parents to really havingour capacity-building approach have two prongs.
we now have a very strong focus of networkingand trying to build the capacity and working with state partners and we continue to workwith school-based teams but that work, as i’ll explain in a little bit, has reallygotten much more sophisticated and much more targeted. in 1995, we thought we were reallysuccessful if we could help each school building that was working with us establish a goalof current engagement as part of their school improvement planning profit. as you look atthe next slide, it talks a little bit about what’s different now and so if you cameto see our pirc in action now, you’d see we really are trying to create other integratedstatewide approach to parent engagement and one of the biggest changes is that parentengagement is no longer the goal. what we
have learned from talking to national expertsand reading and talking to our professional peers is that parent engagement by our definitionnow is an effective strategy that schools can use to reach the ultimate goal which isincreased student learning and so this framework that we’ve adopted that’s based on thework that came out of “new wave of evidence†and their follow-up book, “beyond the bakesale,†you’ll see that we really try to help school staff understand and our statelevelpartners understand that this can be an effective tool that you add to the toolkit that schoolshave to increase in learning. one of the things we also were inspired to do in 2002 is toreally reach out to state-level partners and what we would’ve wanted to have happenedis that all of the people in iowa at the state
level who were promoting parent engagementor who were involved with parents and education that we had a similar framework, we had similardefinitions and we had a similar approach and that we would work together. a friendof mine from new hampshire who’s involved in this work said to me several years agothat she really thought that with all the pircs did and what schools did when it cameto parent engagement really was just a set of random acts of parent engagement and shereally got me thinking about that and we had many conversations. in talking to her, wereally thought about this in iowa, how could we help schools and our state partners movefrom these disconnected events to a series of connected activities that would reallyaim ultimately around parent engagement at
improving student learning. we wanted to helpschools and our state partners go in-depth and overtime and as things really connectedto result in increased student learning. so that is a big theme for us now. when i’mtalking about a bit about what we do at the school level, you’ll see that we reallytry to help schools go in-depth and over time. the other thing that we’re committed toin our framework for parent engagement is continuous improvement in our part and weare constantly talking to national leaders, pircs in other states and our partners atthis state and local level in iowa and really trying to learn from our experience and feedthat back into the process so we can continually make our approach more effective per school.okay, so if you look – i want to talk first
about our state-level strategy. we have aswe retooled ourselves and we try to think of how we could be very systemic at the statelevel, we tried to seek out the partners who were doing the most with parents and learning.so our strongest – we have many. the four that are listed here are really our strongestpartners. the school administrators of iowa, that’s the professional development agencyand the professional organization that represents virtually every school administrator in ourstate. we work very closely with the department of education on multiple initiative includingthe title i office. we have a strong partnership with the iowa association of school boardsfoundation staff and their work with their constituent members throughout the state andas you’ve heard everybody say so far, this
really is a cradle-to-college effort in ourstate. the state gives the money to counties to do early childhood visiting program connectto the iowa empowerment office and we work with them to coordinate parent engagementeven at the early level so we try to have a cradleto- college focus as well at the statelevel. on the next slide, i have some samples of the many things we try to do in terms ofwhat it looks like for us to provide assistance and support and to integrate our efforts withthese existing state initiative and it’s very important to us not to make this a newthing but to make it part of what already exists. every school district in iowa goesthrough an accreditation process and we work with the department of education staff wholead these visits and we give them tools and
training and materials that they can use tohelp prepare the districts for their site visit and to engage in much more meaningfulconversation with district about what do they know works. how can parent involvement bea strategy in their district to support increased student learning and where can they get resourcesand they become for us a referral source where we can serve in this role for districts whowant some assistance on this, if they want to increase what they know about parent engagementor they want to try out some of the strategies or if they want to go in-depth, they can cometo us and we can provide that support. we work with the department of education in everysingle school that does not make adequate yearly progress. for several years, we hada shared staff person who is part of the pirc
and part of the state department of educationand she helps design the process that schools go through to turn their schools around, apart of which very importantly is a strong complete thorough plan for parent engagementin ways that would assist with the turnaround process. as i mentioned, we work with theschool administrators of iowa association and that’s the group that administratorsturn to for leadership. we have a belief in our state that we know if something is goingto happen at a school building, if a school building is going to embrace anything includingchanging the way or improving or adding to the ways they do parent engagement, the principalhas to be on board and they have to be supportive. we thought that if we went to the organization,we partner with them and that organization
would [state] its constituent members, a parentengagement is something that’s important. it’s an effective strategy increasing studentlearning. you should think about it. here’s information about it. you should do it thatthat would really help us as we went to schools and said, “let us support you in these efforts.â€we took a similar approach with the iowa association of school board and have worked with theirstaff to get information out to school board members around the state about what can theydo in their role as school board members, first of all, to understand what effectiveparent engagement looks like and specifically, what those boards can do to support the administratorsand the staff in the district to really work to engage parents in ways that support learning.one of the things i think i’m most pleased
with in our efforts, in our state, we havea set of state standards against which all teachers are evaluated. we have another setof standards against which all administrators are evaluated and if you looked at the administratorstandards, standard 3 is family and community engagement. that standard and the measuresunderneath it were written in a partnership between pirc staff and the state departmentof education and we have followed up on that by training all the superintendents in thestate and all of the administrators who are certified to do principal evaluation aroundwhat does that mean. what does quality family and community engagement look like? what shouldthey look for in their staff and how can they support their staff to increase their knowledgeand be [infused] effective best known practice
into their work. we’re also doing some workwith all the teacher training institutions in iowa trying to give them materials thatthey can use with pre-service teachers to help them understand how to think about parentsin a different way as an effective strategy for improving the learning outcomes for theirstudents. so those are some of the examples we do at the state level and we’re constantlylooking for additional partners in trying to provide information about effective strategieson parent engagement to them so they can embed them in their efforts. one of the things thathappened as a result of our big transformation in 2002 is that we really changed how we workwith schools. our desire is to build the capacity of schools to really engage parents in waysthat support learning and we had a pilot project
that we called spin, sustaining parent involvementnetwork and through this process, we brought teams of educators and parents together andwe train them in our framework, help them understand why this is a good idea, what theresearch says about why it works and it gave them ideas about what they could do and thenwe assisted them both with training and some resources to go out and building by building,develop their own plan for how they might change the way they engage parent and whatwe learned in that process is that some schools did a phenomenal job of structuring a planthat really helped engage parents in multiple meaningful ways but we also saw that manyother schools struggled and had some difficulty and our big learning was that for schoolsthroughout our state to really do this well,
in addition to the frameworks that we had,we needed to get them some sort of a structure to really help them engage in in-depth activitiesover time because we knew that the activities had to be connected to each other and it hadto hit multiple levels. we looked around the country and try to define structure and wefound in illinois, at an agency called the academic development institute, a programcalled solid foundation which provides us with the structure and we have married thatstructure with our efforts on having this really nice framework to support schools throughan enhanced process that we call ispin, the iowa sustaining parent involvement networkand if you look on the next slide, you’ll see the six areas that we helped them focuson. you’ve heard all the speakers stress
the importance of data and this is reallya data-driven approach. it starts with forming a team of parents and educators in equal numbers,parents who represent the diversity of the staff or the diversity of that school, whateverit may be and they begin by collecting data from parents, teachers, and students and datafeeds into all the conversation they have. they engage in a two-year process with us,they meet twice a month and we lead them through a series of conversation and we require whatthey talk about and they’re able then – we don’t require what they answer. they’reable to look at their own circumstances, see what’s important to them and they engagein these twice-monthly conversations per two-year period and in these conversations, you’llsee here on the slide the six things we try
to help them do because we want this to bea systemic effort. we need to hit at all levels in the school how parents are engaged andpart of the conversations really help them focus on and be clear about how they shareleadership among educators and parents for increased student learning. a big part ofwhat we do really helps the school make explicit their expectations of parents in many waysbut also helps make explicit what the parents’ expectations of the school staff are and canbe. we help schools spend a lot of time clarifying policies and practices that promote parentengagement. we look at classroom visit policy, home visit policy. we look at the homeworkpolicy and as the schools are able to sort out why they give homework what the focusis, we also articulate what is the role of
parents in this? what’s the role of studentsand at the same time, help parents understand what they do in support of this process. thereare many conversations about improving communication between parents and schools so that it reallyis two-way and meaningful. we provide multiple professional development opportunities forthe staff and they in turn provide training opportunities for parents. they ask the parentswhat they need and like what nina said, some of that may relate to what at the high schoollevel do they need to support their child in terms of being prepared and being ableto go on, how do they understand the assessment data. the last component is through a seriesof conversations. we really promote as many face-to-face connections if possible bothat school and in the community and that means
we include home visits. it’s a voluntaryprocess and in a moment, jaynette rittman who’s the principal in one of our schoolswhere we’re working is going to talk to you a little bit about this and before i turnthis over to jaynette, i think we have the last participant poll for today asking youto vote to see if you have a core group of dedicated knowledgeable and skilled staffin your schools to engage families to support the student academic process. that’s a littlebit about our approach, our two-pronged approach, the statewide approach and the local approachand our last speaker today is jaynette rittman. she is the principal at garton elementaryin des moines, iowa. there are 600 students in this school, k-5, title i school and about80% of the students receive free/reduced lunch
prices and jaynette’s team has been withus for two years. she’s in the second of the these two years and she’s going to tellyou a little bit about what this looks like and feels like at the building level. >> jaynette rittman: thank you ron. as ronstated, ispin has provided the framework and the structure for many iowa schools. thisis definitely the case at garton. the framework has enhanced our parent engagement strategiesto support student achievement while the structure has provided us the foundation to make itpossible to strengthen our current efforts by providing us with predetermined agendaitems, team time and networking. this allowed us to begin this endeavor with parent engagement.ispin has provided us opportunities for shared
leadership by forming an ispin team. the teamincludes parents, staff, success worker, counselor, administrator and a team facilitator. theteam meets twice a month and plays a critical role in the success of parent engagement strategy.the school’s first step was collecting data from our staff and our parents. this gaveus valuable information on where we needed to begin. the team worked closely to identifythe areas parents and staff agreed upon and those areas were - there were significantdifferences. one area we needed to improve on was clarifying expectations for students,parents and staff. the team created a student-parent-teacher compact, homework policy, disrespect policyand a visitor policy which clearly defines the expectations for students, parents andstaff. we found these works extremely useful
to refer back to for clarification throughoutthe year. one way we were able to get staff buy-in was by sharing the data with staff,having them analyze the data and conclude that clear expectations were needed to supportparent engagement and ultimately, increase student achievement. we were able to effectivelydisseminate the information planned and discussed during our ispin meetings to all of our staffthrough grade-level meetings. we found that the dissemination of information in our pocsprovided staff more opportunities to openly share their feelings towards the informationwe were presenting to them. we were able to share information, receive input from staffand take suggestions back to the ispin team to make adjustments. this process has beena very effective way to hear everyone’s
voice which is critical in the change process.creating a welcoming environment for all parents is extremely important for us at garton. wehave an extremely diverse population with sixteen different languages represented atgarton. one important way we can gain trust was to do home visits and we’ve done homevisits for the past two years. for those staff that really wanted to participate, we hadstaff share their experiences with their colleagues to gain a greater interest among all staff.several staff shared how proud students were to have their teacher come to their house.they would clean their rooms and they’d put their best clothes on for their teacher.a fourthgrade teacher shared with us that one of her parents commented to her, “iknew you really cared about my son when you
took the time to come to our house and meetus.†one of our second-grade teachers said that during the year that she did home visitswas the best year when communicating with her parents. home visits had a huge impacton the success for her school year. home visit is an area that we want to continue to strengthenbecause we see the value in them. this year, we had 10 out of 24 classroom teachers completehome visit. it’s our hope to have 100% participation this fall and by completing home visits, staffsare able to gain a greater sense of empathy for the families that we serve. we also provideopen house and culture fair and parent activity nights based on our curriculum, parent workshopsbased on parent interest surveys and we find it very valuable to have parents be part ofour school-wide discipline plan prior to students
receiving an expectation room referral. thishas been a challenge for us since some parents don’t understand they play critical rolein assisting the school with their child’s behavior but it has been very important tous as well. as you can see, parent engagement is a strategy that must be woven in throughoutthe day to gain the trust and open communication between students, parents and staff. it mustbe a partnership willing to change and grow to support student achievement. this partnershipdoes not happen overnight and it takes an in-depth look at current practices and overtime through the use of data and professional development, resources and the willingnessto change, the partnership will grow and develop. you can see that we’ve provided you additionalquotes from a parent, principal’s and a
superintendent’s perspective. thank you. >> jaque minow: all right, thank you, everybody.we’re now going to turn to questionand- answer portion. just to reiterate, we putin the notepad around the side earlier but all the slides and the audio of today’spresentation will be sent out via email and made available. with that, we’re going togo to [audio gap] sorry, we’re having just a minor technical difficulty. okay, so nowwith that, we’re going to do our best to get to questions and answers. there have beena lot of questions that have come in over the course of the presentation so we’regoing to - literally hundreds so were going to do or best and we’ll go ahead and getstarted. ron, there’s a question regarding
the anne henderson book. participants arewondering if you could give the reference information for that book again. >> ron mirr: there were two books that i mentioned.the first one is called the “new wave of evidence†and it’s a sedl publication.i know there’s a link to the sedl website and you can google “new wave of evidenceâ€and download it as a pdf. it’s by anne henderson and karen mapp. that was 2002 and they hada follow-up publication in 2006 called “beyond the bake sale†and you can google that andfind that on amazon.com. >> jaque minow: okay, great and thank youand nina, somebody was wondering, what are the fifteen communities in which united wayis doing the at&t work?
>> nina sazer o’donnell: i don’t havethem all in my head and so we will post them with the archive of the webinar. >> jaque minow: jaynette, a participant waswondering in which subjects did you all provide the parenting workshops? >> jaynette rittman: we did school disciplineand we incorporated 1-2-3 magic for behavior discipline as far as discipline at home andwe also incorporated esl workshops for esl families providing them information that wasvaluable to them for a successful school year. >> jaque minow: now, here’s a question,are there resources out there that help parent education programs evaluate their work? formalevaluation is often too expensive for schools
to fund. so would ron or heather, would oneof you be willing to take that question? >> heather weiss: this is heather. yes, ithink there are some tools out there and if you go to our website at the harvard familyresearch project and look at the family involvement section of that website, i think you willfind some of those tools. >> jaque minow: great and another question,are administrators ready to provide time to educators to receive professional developmenton family and community engagement? ron and jaynette, what’s been the experience atiowa? >> ron mirr: i can tell that in iowa thatwhen we talk to administrators about - that we understand the most important thing thatcontributes to student learning is quality
instruction and that they can improve theeffects of their quality instructions if they add to that parent engagement and ways that’slinked to learning, we get their attention very quickly and when they understand thatand they become familiar with what the research says about it, they have become very willingto allow folks to have release time or time to engage in professional development aroundthis. i have to tell you that the problem we have in iowa with our pirc is that as wego out and talk to schools about participating with us, we have too many yeses and we’rerunning a little short on staff and so i would tell you that my experience has been thatonce administrators understand how it’s linked to learning, it helps them achievetheir desired goal, they’re very interested
and supportive. >> jaque minow: great, we have a questionfor anna… >> heather weiss: jacque, could i chime inwith two additional things in response to this question. anna mentioned early on thatthere was recent research about the importance of family engagement particularly for lowperformingschools. i want to put it another resource on the table and it’s called “organizingschools for improvement: lessons from chicago.†it just came out in january of this year.the lead author is anthony bryk and basically, this is the best analysis i know of longitudinaldata and this instance, from a set of high-poverty schools in chicago and it’s a very sophisticateddata set and analysis of what differentiated
the schools that we’re able to turn aroundon serious indicators of a child’s achievement versus that those that did not. they comeup with five essential elements, one of which is family and community engagement. the otherbook i would put on the table is by rudy crew who was the superintendent in new york cityand most recently, in miami. his book is called “only connect†and as a superintendentat some of the biggest cities in the country, basically his argument is that it is essentialfor him as a superintendent to have engaged families if he is going to move his districton bottom line achievement. so to the question that will people allow teachers to get trainedin this, that this course is changing or not now so that we’re understanding that we’renot going to get a lot of schools turning
around unless we begin to incorporate familyand community engagement as a key part of the strategy for turnaround. >> ron mirr: i’ll add one other comment.in our state in iowa, the eight largest school districts get together monthly to talk abouthow they can mutually support each other and this past year when they were asked, whatis it you want help with and need help with, among those eight, the number one or the numbertwo item was, how do we engage families? so they’re asking for it. >> jaque minow: right and the next questionis for anna and it relates to the proposed consolidation and wondering – there’sa participant wondering if pircs will still
have to be funded past the school year 2011?how does the administration propose to go about to disseminating practices like thisin state and among local districts? >> anna hinton: this is anna. in the 2011proposed budget, the department has consolidated pirc’s funding with the extending educationaloptions choice program and under that program, there will be funds, national activity fundsset aside to continue funding parent engagement strategies. so there will be money availableto continue funding some of the strategies that were funded under the pirc program. >> jaque minow: great. question to ron, allthe partners in your group were selected from the school community. i guess they were selectionsof the school community. do you have any parent
or community-based organizations as partners?also, i was curious to understand how do you draw on parent cultural capital to informyou in helping advance student achievement? >> ron mirr: okay, i’ve made a note. that’sa long question. i’ll see if i can do my best [laughter] both parts. on the first part,parent and community partners, because of the timeframe today, i listed some of ourkey partners. we have many other partners. for example, we have an effort called “partneringin communities†that we do with the iowa state extension and that’s where they havedeveloped a very structured process to go in from the community perspective and havebusiness partners, other groups mobilize the community including the school to find waysto - the community support increased parent
engagement. that’s been picked up by iowastate extension and it’s offered in all of our counties around the state and we havemultiple groups that have been in that process for several years. we also reach out to parentserving groups. we work and partner with our pti which is the parent training informationcenter which was a federally-funded project to support families, kids with special needs.we reach out to different groups. we have multiple projects that partner with parentgroups around cultural issues. one of our projects is called – i hope i say this right,“latinas el exito†which is we work with the association of university women and theywork in our communities in iowa that have large latina populations and they work withjunior high girls and try to pair them with
adult latina mentors and really try to helpconnect them not unlike what you heard in terms of united way process for looking atwhat does it take to go on to higher education and career. so anytime we find an agency orgroup, whether it’s a large public agency or as parent-led group, if their interestis in increasing parent engagement as strategy for supporting student learning, we will tryto embrace them and we have many different partners. one of the links that you will seeis to our website and you can go on our website and locate what some of those are. culturalcompetence is an important piece of what we do and we have tried to bring in professionaldevelopment speakers for our administrators and teachers to talk about how you can harnessthe energy of all parents including parents
of color and bring that into the process ofhow often – when we talk about our framework and what we’ve learned from anne hendersonand karen mapp, we really try to help our school teams understand how to honor the contributionsof all our parents and have that be an important factor in what they - when they put theirplans in place. >> jaque minow: great and anna, we have afollow-up question. it sounds like there will be spending for parent engagement strategiesin the federal budget after 2011 but there will not be pircs, is that correct? >> anna hinton: i can’t speak definitivelyabout as to whether or not the pirc program will be put back in in some shape or form.right now, the proposal is to consolidate
the program with another program. so that’sthe only bit of information that i have right now as it relates to the pircs. >> jaque minow: ron, this is another questionfor you. we have a couple of participants asking what your background is. are you aneducator or were you a parent that got involved? >> ron mirr: i started my work with parentengagement sixteen years ago, the same year my oldest child was born and i had an interest- my background is as a social worker. i was trained to be a mental health specialist buti am the child of teachers. i’m the husband of a teacher and i’m around teachers allthe time so i see myself as a good bridge between the world of education and the worldof human services and support.
>> jaque minow: for any of the presenters,can anybody speak to strategies and effective practices in engaging limited-english families? >> nina sazer o’donnell: this is nina. i’dlike to tell a quick little story about something that happened at san antonio where the unitedway and community partners in the city were all working together. it was part of the makingconnections neighborhood. they’re attempting - giving intensive technical assistance tohelp exceed a lot of trajectory by the annie casey foundation and after i looking at data,everybody agreed that in a [sports] school, in a predominantly primary spanish languagecommunity, kids were falling off – actually, they started out looking at high school graduationand found the kids were starting to miss school.
the [students who’s] delinquent have allkinds of academic problems and test scores going to the toilet, went into the toiletin about fourth grade. so they decided after much more deliberation that family engagementwas the solution and brought in a group of parents and said, “now, here’s the data.here’s what we’ve learned. family engagement is an issue here for models.†the parentssaid to them, “if you give us a model that won’t work, let us design something†andthey designed an initiative that’s been going on is for i think two or three yearsnow where parents began to organize parent engagement, home visits to other parents,workshops, trainings about the importance of being involved in your kid’s school.they started something that still continues
called - in all these four elementary schoolscalled “coffee at the curb†where volunteer parents show up everyday with coffee and treatsfor parents who actually bring their kids to school. they’ll encourage that and bythe way, over the last two years test scores have gone through the roof. discipline – truancy,all of those issues have disappeared. every one of these four schools now has a parentroom and both principals who had formerly been disciplinarians are now able to helpthe parents run the parent room and parent engagement and strategies. so it’s definitelypossible whether parents speak spanish or other languages but i think a key is involvingparents in the solution. >> jaynette rittman: i would like to alsopiggyback on that, this is jaynette. two of
our parent workshops that we held this yearwere specifically for our esl students and their parents and we had wonderful turnoutsfor both of those and it was basically to provide them information that they neededto help their child succeed in school. one was focused around the iowa test of basicskills which is our standardized test that we have to give to all students which manyof our esl students struggle with and having a better understanding as parents, they wereable to support their student or their children and provide them the resources that they neededto support them as far as just the basic things that we might take for granted, getting agood night’s rest, eating breakfast, coming in comfortable clothes, being prepared forthe week that we are taking our test for iowa
test of basic skills. providing them justthe general information, they were so grateful and they were so appreciative of everythingthat we were able to offer them. they want to have more of these workshops next yearand like i said, we started off with two this year and we did one at the first semesterand one at second semester and parents were thrilled to be a part. i think if we givethem that opportunity, they will come and they do appreciate everything that we cando for them. >> ron mirr: one of the pieces of technicalassistance we have provided to the schools we work with, the school team relates thedata and i believe i said to you that at the start of the process, they gather data fromparents, teachers and students. an important
thing that we do with these teams is havethem look at how many of their parents answer this survey, who these parents are and dothey represent the diversity including the language diversity of their building. oneof the first activities is, if you don’t have the voice of those parents representedreally stopping and thinking about and taking steps to make sure the voice of all parentsis represented in the early process and they work – and sometimes, it’s harder fora team than other teams. they’ve been trying to find some building-based local strategiesthat can really up that parent voice not just in the survey but the ongoing conversationsof the team. >> jaque minow: so one question that we’regetting a lot of is not surprising in terms
of the current economic climate and [leas]struggling to preserve any innovative - any progress that’s been made or institutessome of these best practices in the face of what [trends] came out of this system, prettysevere budget cuts regarding early and k-12 education. so does anybody on the phone ordoes anybody on the presentation have some insight into that? >> heather weiss: you mean inside in the senseof actions that one could take to try to do something about it? >> jaque minow: well, i think not only actionsto take to try to do something about it but some strategies to get creative in terms ofwhere you’re looking for funding or maybe
low cost options or expanding partnershipsto leverage community assets that are there. >> heather weiss: nina i think is somebodywho knows the work that united way is doing that’s had the kind of partnership thatunited way is creating with families with community-based organizations and the schoolis a really good example of how to leverage everybody’s resources to try to really createa systemic, sustained and integrated approach to family engagement. maybe you want speaka little more to it, nina. >> nina sazer o’donnell: well, i think jacqueactually outlined the strategies that have been working. i’m actually, as we’re speakingat a meeting of six communities that we’ve been working with over the last two yearson strengthening families initiatives which
are elementary parent engagement and they’rereporting what they’ve been doing for the last two years and a couple of them, for example,boswell which is a very – there’s not a lot of money. it’s supposed [unintelligible]the country talk about not having money and being - i’m not saying not having moneyis good but not having money caused them to think about partnerships in leveraging andengaging with families in different ways and engaging - looking at families as assets.so the other thing that i think is another way to think about this is [figuring] yourcommunity. if you got $50 million tomorrow for family engagement, what would you do withit and sometimes thinking that through will lead you to think about things that need tohappen in the down curve, even having [dollars]
that might be helpful and it might give youdirection for where you could partner and leverage. i think the other – my other answeris that the kind of work that we’re all collectively doing to those demonstrate effectivefamily engagement work and to document it in ways that funders and other investors aregoing to be confident that the work is going to yield the results that are promised isultimately going to help us all move forward with resources that we need. >> ron mirr: i think it’s always nice andvery helpful to have resources as why you are out looking for those resources, one ofthe things that we encourage our teams to do is to reflect on all of their current waysthey are reaching out and engaging families
and to think of those in light of what theresearch says is an effective way to work with parents to increase student learning.i think we find that many our teams that it’s not hard for them to start something new butwhat is harder for them is to examine their current practice and work smarter and letgo of some of the ways that have less evidence of being connected to a student thing andput other strategies in place so i know that one thing that the schools can do when theydon’t have as many resources is to really do a little self-assessment and do a scanof what’s going on already in their building or their district to see are these the mosteffective ways and are they things can be replaced at no cost or low cost.
>> jaque minow: i think that’s some greatinsight. anna, we have – yes? >> heather weiss: this is [audio gap] cani add one more thing? >> jaque minow: yes. >> heather weiss: one of the co-sponsors ofour webinar series is the national pta and i encourage people to go on their websitebecause they’re doing a lot with respect to public education around the importanceof family and community engagements and trying to bring the research base into the publicpolicy conversation for example. so i highly recommend it just on a legislative guide toface family engagement legislation so i highly recommend that people to take a look whatthe pta is doing as well.
>> jaque minow: we have a question for anna.we have a participant who wants to how the department of education is working with otherfederal agencies who are also committed to cultivating child, family, neighbor, teacher,service provider, pastor, policymaker, et cetera engagement for optimal child development? >> anna hinton: the department is engagedwith – well, we co-sponsor an interagency working group with hhs and i believe it’sa work group with about seven sub-committees of which family engagement is one of thembut that’s one large interagency working group that we’re currently actively engagedin and then there are conversations around partnering with other federal agencies butthere’s nothing concrete or set in stone
that i’m able to talk about currently butthose conversations are going on internally but the one huge interagency working groupthat we are currently a part of is with hhs. >> jaque minow: hey, we have another questionfor the department. the participant wants [audio gap] parent [and call] for a shortand quick process and do not require school leaders to get inputs from parents. what policylanguage could be introduced in the sea to ensure that low-performing schools are requiredto work with parents and communities in the turnaround process that include long-termparent engagement goals as part of that turnaround plan. >> anna hinton: right. well, the departmenthas issued a blueprint which really highlights
what some of the current thinking is aroundthat but in the future, we will be releasing more specifics as it relates to the reauthorizationand at that time, we’ll be able to talk a little bit more about what the policy recommendationsare. >> jaque minow: right and before we go, iwanted to check and see if there were any phone – any questions or anybody on thephone. operator: if you would like to ask a question, it’s “star, one†on yourtouchtone phone and you may withdraw yourself at any time by pressing the “pound†key.once again, it’s “star, one†to ask a question. we’ll pause momentarily forquestions to queue. it appears we have no question.
>> jaque minow: okay, great. so i think wecan take just a couple more. we have one to the presenters. i don’t know if this goesto ron or heather or anna. this participant wants to know if there’s been any discussionabout replicating the ispin program that the iowa pirc is doing in other pircs throughoutthe country? >> ron mirr: i can answer that. >> jaque minow: okay. >> ron mirr: actually, the process that imentioned, the structure that we folded into our framework was developed by a pirc at thetime in illinois. that was the academic development institute so it started with the pirc, cameto us and there are multiple pircs around
the country that are already using – weweren’t the first ones to do it. we’ve taken on a slightly different path by statingit into our framework but i’m aware right now of two other pircs that are actively startingto implement the ispin version and this summer, we are meeting with the folks from adi andtalking about that very topic, how can we support other pircs or other organizationsor schools themselves to be able to implement this process if they’d like to. it’s verymuch on our mind and we are working hard to promote that. >> jaque minow: hey, we have one more question,are there examples of educational service districts helping schools with parent engagementstrategies to any of your knowledge?
>> heather weiss: i think that the closesti know of, i think there are probably are but the closest i know is in fact new visionswhich is work organization in new york. it’s a kind of an equivalent to that and in fact,new visions is obviously helping people develop their family and community engagement strategy.i think that would be a question that probably a number of the pircs could also answer atsome point. you might want to put it to them and post it on the post-webinar website becausei know from my experience talking with them around the country [audio gap] working withthose groups. >> ron mirr: i can tell you that in iowa,our educational service districts are called aeas or area education agencies and they arestrong partners and the spin process that
our ispin grew out of was developed by oneof those organizations and is still put in
![parents and education]()
place and we partner very strongly with ouraeas and we have aea staff who work in concert with our program not only on this school-basedeffort but also on our early childhood efforts. >> jaque minow: hey, with that, we wantedto thank all our presentors for today’s webinar.
