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Making the Parent-School Connection

In three short years the Chalkboard Project, a coalition of five Oregon-based nonprofit organizations, has become a major player in Oregon’s K–12 public education system. Whether backing education reform bills in the state legislature, conducting statewide public opinion surveys, or administering grant programs, the nonpartisan group has helped put public education in an even brighter spotlight. Increasing parent and community involvement has been at the center of several of the organization’s initiatives. Northwest Education spoke with Shirley Skidmore, the Chalkboard Project’s director of communications and outreach, about the high priority the project has placed on this issue and the lessons learned so far.

NW Education: How did parent and community involvement become a major initiative for the Chalkboard Project?

Skidmore: When Chalkboard was launched, back in early 2004, we did a significant amount of public opinion research. We wanted to know what issues Oregonians thought were important, in terms of improving schools. One of the things we found, not surprisingly, was the idea that the more a parent is involved in a child’s education, the better off that child will be. It’s an idea that really seemed to resonate throughout the state. In fact, lack of parent involvement in schools was identified as one of the two main obstacles to student success, along with a lack of stable funding.

Oregonians saw this issue as an extremely high priority. About 75 percent of those surveyed agreed that it’s an urgent or high priority to help parents become better involved in their children’s education. So, as we completed our research, that became a focal point for us. Of course it’s very difficult to legislate that kind of thing. We’ve tried to develop grants and other kinds of opportunities, because you can’t legislate parent involvement.

What are some examples of those grants and opportunities?

Over the last couple of years we’ve initiated several programs in partnership with a variety of organizations—the Oregon Department of Education, individual school and districts, the state Parent Teacher Association (PTA), and employers around the state. All these projects are focused on different aspects of getting parents involved.

One of the first things we did was a grant program called Tech Tools. A majority of parents we surveyed said they would benefit from having online connections with teachers to check their children’s homework or grades. For many parents there are barriers to physically going to the school to have regular visits with the teacher. So we partnered with the Intel Corporation to provide grants to 10 schools and districts throughout the state, totaling roughly $32,000. Basically, these schools and districts used existing software and enhanced it with additional technology to provide the capability for teachers to connect directly with parents. That program was very, very successful. Not surprisingly, parents felt more connected to the schools. But one thing we learned that we hadn’t thought about beforehand was that it also helped reduce the tension between parents and teachers. Parents who are able to log on and check their child’s progress several times during a school year aren’t so surprised when a report card comes home.

Did you find access to computers to be a problem?

We didn’t get a lot of feedback about that, but there was one example where the school worked really hard to make it clear to parents that there were plenty of opportunities to log onto the program. They partnered with a library in their community to make computers available and to raise awareness. Every parent had a password, so they could log onto the school’s system from any computer, no matter where they were. In general, access didn’t seem to be an issue.

Do you have plans to share the results of this program statewide?

We haven’t talked about next steps. This year we’re focusing very heavily on the Oregon legislative session. This is our first session and we’re working hard to get some things accomplished. Beyond that, we’re going to focus most of our parent outreach efforts for the rest of this year on our Running Start program, which is an effort to connect with hard-to-reach families. But, I do expect that at some point we’re going to share the benefits of this kind of program. Obviously there is some cost in doing this. There is training involved. Teachers have to learn how to use the system. You have to have a school or district that really wants to do it. That was part of our grant application process—you had to have the necessary support and buy-in in place. People needed to be ready and willing to use it.

Tell me more about the Running Start program.

The Running Start program was a toolkit that we designed over the course of several months and then launched last year. We had heard in our outreach to minority parents and parents in low-income situations that they feel very disconnected from their schools for a variety of reasons—they feel intimidated or there are cultural issues that make them feel uncomfortable walking into the school. So we created a two-part training kit to address some of those issues.

The first part is to help school district employees better understand the challenges parents face when trying to connect with schools. Some of those issues are simply about trying to put food on the table—they don’t have time to go to the school. Other barriers are more about cultural differences. They can be barriers that the school creates without even knowing it. So, we did three statewide training sessions last year. Each session served more than 100 school district employees. The idea was that they would absorb this information and take it back to their schools and districts and share it with other staff members.

The second part of the toolkit is about the practical tools and strategies those school officials can use to reach out to parents. Those can be simple things like helping parents understand the school report card. A lot of parents don’t understand the information they receive and don’t feel comfortable asking for explanations.

At Chalkboard we haven’t done any direct parent training. We’ve been focused on providing training to the schools, rather than to the parents. But we’re currently looking at how we can partner with other organizations—beyond the schools—that are already doing parent outreach. We hope to do some of that later this year. There’s a clear need for that.

Have you been able to share some of the Running Start information statewide?

Yes. In fact, all these training materials are on our Web site and several have been translated into Spanish. We had about 13,000 downloads of the various materials during the last year, so clearly they’re getting some use. We think that’s a good start—trying to share some information, district to district, about innovative ways to connect with parents.

What are some examples of organizations you’re looking to partner with in the future?

One organization that we’re looking at is the Salem-Keizer Coalition for Equality. It’s run by Eduardo Angulo who has been very involved with Chalkboard from the start. He’s helped translate some of our materials into Spanish and he’s served as a translator at some of our meetings. His organization is trying to reach out to the minority community in Salem, particularly the Latino community, and they’re very interested in partnering with us to do that. So, it’s about finding organizations that are already out in the community, trying to do this kind of work. How can we provide them with some of the tools and resources they need to do that?

Our most recent grant program has been a partnership with the Oregon Parent Teacher Association (PTA). We’ve given roughly $15,000 in grants to a number of school PTAs around the state to promote diverse family involvement in schools. They’ve been using these grants in a variety of ways—to help transport parents to school events, to create family nights at schools, to translate materials, all kinds of things. Those started late last year.

How have you partnered with the Oregon Department of Education (ODE), especially around this issue of parent and community involvement?

One example is a grant program that we launched last summer. ODE developed a family involvement template that outlines how a school or district can set up a successful parent-family involvement program. What we did was to provide $1,000 stipends to 10 schools around the state who were willing to be early adopters of that new policy. The idea was that they would use the money to help implement the new policy and then report back to the state.

The template that ODE developed is comprehensive. Basically it gives schools and districts a lot of ideas about how such a program could be set up, monitored, and evaluated: How to include parents in the development of the program, how to conduct necessary trainings, how to carry out program evaluations. The template is there, but the schools must implement it themselves. Reporting back to the state was a major part of the grant. The template is designed to be used statewide and we wanted this information to have the widest possible dissemination. Our role was to provide some incentive for schools to actually start using the template and then sharing their best practices.

Besides the statewide surveys you conducted, what other kinds of research did you draw on to develop your parent and community involvement programs?

We did quite a bit of best practices research, all around the country. Our main focus as an organization has been: How can you most effectively invest money to raise student achievement? That’s also how we built a lot of our legislative agenda: early age initiatives, support for teacher quality, and those kinds of things. We want our dollars to have the largest possible impact. Certainly, parent-family-community involvement came out of that research as something that was very important. However, we didn’t find a validation for one single best practice—everyone should be doing this to get parents involved. And that’s why we decided that we were going to try several different things that had a promising research base. We felt like we need to “grow” some of our own projects—things that made sense for Oregon. The technology program, for instance, is not a totally innovative idea, but not a lot of people were doing it. We’re kind of building our own research base. The individual grants to schools about how to best get parents involved: Are there certain things that work better than others? That kind of information is going to help grow a best practices base that is specific to Oregon’s needs.

Tell me about your employer incentive program.

That’s another very important element that isn’t often addressed. When we were doing research with parents we found, overwhelmingly, that they wanted to be more involved with their children’s schools and more connected to teachers, but there were a couple of obvious barriers: time and conflicts with work. Not surprising. So we have been on a statewide push to get employers to step up and do a few key things that would help support their employees’ involvement in the schools, whether they have children in school or not. That can include anything from giving their employees Internet access and maybe 10 minutes to check in with their child’s teacher. Or, to give the employees flex time to go to student-teacher conferences or to volunteer at the school. Those policies are meant to include all employees, including those who don’t have children in school. When you have so many Oregonians that don’t have children in school but do pay taxes for schools, it’s very important to try to get them engaged in a firsthand way.

We have more than 100 employers in the state now who have stepped up to what we’re calling the Employer Challenge. They’ve agreed to address at least three things. First is providing time—time on a computer to check in with a teacher, time to volunteer at the school. Second is encouraging volunteerism. That could be providing mentors to the school or loaning employees to a district to help with areas where there is a specific need, or providing opportunities for school employees to come into your company to learn more. And the third is providing resources: Do they have a matching program for donations to schools, for instance? Or any other kind of employee incentives to volunteer in schools or do other kinds of education work? That could include providing space at your business for parent-teacher conferences.

So, those are the three areas we have focused on. In some ways this program can be a way to recognize organizations for work they were already doing but were not getting any recognition for.

How would you say your parent involvement initiatives tie into the overall goals of the Chalkboard Project?

What we found in our surveys and outreach is that Oregonians, as a whole, want our schools to be better, but there are a lot of frustrations out there and divided opinions about how schools are spending money, just to give one example. So there are divisions, but also a universal feeling that they want schools to be better.

At the same time, 75 percent of Oregonians do not have children in school. So, how do they get their information about schools? They read it in the newspaper, maybe, but they don’t have that direct connection. And then parents are another part of the equation: How do you get them more engaged? If you can’t get more parent and community engagement in schools, you’re not going to help build a better understanding of what our schools are doing and the challenges they’re facing and what we feel they should do to improve. What’s working, what’s not? Creating this kind of awareness helps build support for legislative initiatives.

Right now we’re pushing for some teacher quality initiatives, some early learning initiatives, and funding initiatives. Oregonians are not ready to totally disrupt our system. They think our system is working OK, but they believe our schools need to get better. So, what are the best ways to connect more people to the education system in ways that help students achieve? You can’t just pass a lot of legislation to do that. Legislation will help. Putting funding in some key areas will help. But connecting with parents and other community members is critical. These projects are about giving schools and districts more tools to reach out to those folks. In a lot of cases teachers and principals would love to reach out to these families but they don’t know how. They need some help. We’re trying to do that by building partnerships in as many ways as we can, because there’s no single way to get to higher student achievement.