100 Posts in 100 Days
This is the third post in a mini-series about lessons learned from working with parents.
When I earned and accepted my first principalship, it was in a school bearing some similarity to the one where I had first taught. It was a Title I elementary school in a suburban area with approximately 500 students in grades kindergarten – 6. Most students attended by virtue of living within our neighborhood boundaries, and we were also a district site for a highly capable program and for a self-contained special education program. Students in those programs came from schools throughout our district. Sixty-nine percent of our students were eligible for free and reduced lunch, 32% were language learners, and 60% identified as ethnic minorities.
Included within our neighborhood boundary was a community of subsidized townhomes owned and run by the county housing authority. Additional services were available to the residents: a youth center which offered recreational programs for children; a family center which offered language classes, citizenship classes, and career development; and a women’s health center providing maternity and infant support services.
The housing authority and our school shared many common interests and provided overlapping services for our families. Coordinating and communicating about those services was important to achieving success with our families, and something I had to learn a lot about in my first years. Monthly, I attended meetings held at the community center with the directors of the various programs offered where we would discuss our respective work and the ways we could support one another.
Among the many shared challenges between the school and the housing authority, two were very common: communication across different languages and attendance at family-focused events.
For our part, when we hosted family events at school, we used a number of strategies to communicate and encourage attendance:
- we designed them as family events with all children invited (as opposed to parent-only events),
- we “talked them up” with our students in an effort to generate excitement,
- we generated beautiful print announcements which were sent home with students in multiple languages,
- we had interpreters in attendance,
- we shared information on our school website and via automated phone calls home, and
- we provided a school bus to pick families up and take them home after the event.
And yet, time and time again, attendance at our events fell fall short of what he had hoped.
One evening, I attended an event in the housing community. Many of their strategies for reaching families were the same. The event was for the whole family, food was served, fliers were posted on the community bulletin boards, and interpreters were present.
Yet, their gym was full. Full of families that also attended our school, but many of whom I had never met or even seen. Most of the families in attendance were Somalese who had recently immigrated to the US. Women and young children tended to congregate together while school-aged children ran and played together. Men also gathered together in groups, apparently telling stories and laughing boisterously. The mood was energetic and festive. When the time came for the presentation of information, the crowd quieted and was attentive.
I couldn’t help but to wonder aloud to some of the community center staff about how they were able to generate such good attendance? I learned that they had used some of their organization’s volunteers to go door-to-door to the townhouses informing families of the event. They had done so the day before the event and again in the hours just before the event. I also learned that they had been especially sure to talk to some of the mothers considered influential or leaders within the community. The mothers would understandably bring their children. They would also, it turned out, use their influence to encourage the other mothers and their husbands or partners to attend. Personal invites extended to the leaders within the community were key to getting families to come.
One of the “influential” moms was someone I was coming to know a bit. So, I asked her if she had, in fact, helped spread the word and encouraged others to come. Not only did she affirm everything that I had been told by the housing authority staff member, she shared a perspective I had never considered. She told me that all those print fliers coming home that had been translated weren’t very helpful because many of the adults were illiterate in their written language. Come to think of it, all the fliers that I had seen on the community board in this venue for this very event were all written in English. It was more valuable to have written information in English that they could take to the interpreters.
That night at the community center, my assumptions and biases were thankfully “handed to me”, to put it nicely. The list of strategies I shared earlier were all considered best practice and commonly used amongst the schools in our district. In blindly adopting them, I had failed to pay close attention to my school’s families. Just because something worked well in another setting didn’t mean that it was going to transfer well to my setting. I had taken for granted what this part of our school community needed most in order to engage with us, without ever talking with them.
I left the community center that night with new ideas and strategies that our school could use to engage with parents and families. More importantly, I left that night humbled and reminded that in order to lead the community, one of my most important jobs was to truly know the community.