Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

Written by Mica Pollock, Tona Delmonico, Gina d'Haiti, and Ana Maria Nieto, for the Parent Connector project

As we documented this project, we thought about OneVille's project-wide questions:

Who needs to communicate what info to whom, through which media, in order to support young people?

Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?

How might basic tech help increase community cooperation in young people’s success, by supporting diverse students, teachers, parents, administrators, service providers, and other community members to share ideas, resources, and information and to build relationships?

Summary

(A bird’s eye view for the quick reader. We're addressing these questions:)

a. Communication we hoped to improve. (What aspect of communicating about or with young people did the project address, or hope to improve?)

(Where did people want to go with the project? When did the project take place? Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent?)

b. Concrete communication improvement(s). What did the project accomplish? How did communication improve? What new support for young people may have been accomplished?

c. Main communication realizations and implementation realizations. (At this point, what's our main realization about improving communications in public education? (We'll say a few overall words in response to OneVille's research questions, above!)

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The Parent Connector Network was a key 2010-11 effort of an overall Working Group exploring Schoolwide Communication at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville. In this Working Group, we have been working to help ensure that all parents in a multilingual and socially diverse school can access important school information and share ideas with other parents. Over the course of two years, we met parents particularly committed to improving schoolwide communication and linked them into the effort.

In the past year, we particularly paid attention to including immigrant parents in this loop of school information and input. We focused on creating a "Parent Connector Network," in which bilingual volunteer parents ("Connectors") use phones, Googleforms and a phone-messaging hotline to help get information to and from immigrant parents who speak their language.

We are currently working with 3 Spanish-speaking, 3 Portuguese-speaking, and 2 Haitian Creole-speaking parent Connectors. Each Connector is asked to call approximately 10 other families once a month to share key information from the principal/school and to ask questions about any issues parents are facing. The Connectors are also on-call to these parents during the school year to help them find answers to both general and specific questions or concerns they may have about their child’s school.

This past year the Connectors have also become key innovators of school-wide translation and interpretation infrastructure. We spent late spring 2011 mapping it out! (We’ll show you some diagrams later.)

(COLORED TEXT BOX: Here's ONE MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION from the Parent Connector Network: in a multilingual school and district, improving translation and interpretation -- and strengthening relationships between families and educators -- requires getting more organized about effectively tapping a key local resource: bilingualism.

Now, let's document each aspect of the project. Here we go!

Communication we hoped to improve

A bit more. What aspect of existing communication did we hope to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?

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At Somerville’s Healey School (K-8), as in many U.S. schools, parents hail from across the globe and speak many languages. Barriers of language keep parents from being equally informed about school issues, events, and even educational opportunities. So do disparities in tech access, tech training, and time -- and, gaps in personal relationship and connections.

The Healey School enrolls a full U.S. range of families with different communication habits and needs. Some are middle-class parents who email the principal and Superintendent constantly. Others are left out of the most basic communications of schooling. Some parents have no computers and no internet. One Spanish-speaking parent told her Connector she’d been trying for a year to meet with her child’s teacher. One Portuguese-speaking dad we knew of worked such long hours he didn't even have time to come to school to post a sign saying he wanted to pay someone to help him drive his daughter to school after he left for work. (His "Connector" made the sign for him.) Time for “face time” itself is key to school-home communication: some families have time to volunteer countless hours in classrooms during the school day and so get regular access to their child’s teacher. Parents who saw each other regularly at face to face school events made friends, joined listservs, signed up in directories, and showed up at next events.

Everyone at the Healey talked about needing better school-home communication, particularly for immigrant families and those without computer access/knowledge and those who couldn’t or didn’t show up often in person at the school. A listserv has long enrolled only some. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. For many, parent teacher conferences require interpreters, and scheduling those interpreters itself is a structural communication problem.

Throughout the schoolwide communication working group, we operated from a central principle already core to the Healey School: a child can’t be educated as effectively if parents aren’t included as key partners in the project. So, schools should ensure access to school information and pull all parents into dialogue about improving their children’s school experience.

Because language barriers particularly have excluded Healey parents from full participation, the Parent Connector Network has focused on reaching out to parents who speak the district's 3 main languages other than English: Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole.

Begun in earnest in Winter 2011, the Parent Connector Network is a parent-led effort (in partnership with school administrators and staff) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) to more recently immigrated parents via a phone tree. The Connectors have come to also use Google forms/Google spreadsheets, and a multilingual hotline we made, to help ensure that information reaches immigrant and low-income families who share a school.

We've also been working to build personal relationships between bilingual parents and immigrant parents in order to bring more voices into school debates and more people into school events and leadership, as well as help the school respond more quickly to parent needs.

Because each innovation the Connectors started needed other components to work effectively, we have come to think in terms of creating an "infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school. Over the 2010-11 school year, we've been fleshing out a full list of such systemic supports. The Parent Connector Network is a key component, but it's not the only one!

Process: How did the project change and grow over time?

How we realized and redirected things. Two sections, one short and the second long:

Basic History

The groundwork needed to support the current work.

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As a multilingual group of parents (a few of whom speak only English), it has taken us two years to fully understand:

1) the barriers in the way of English learners' participation in English-dominant schools;

2) the full communication "infrastructure" necessary to include more immigrant parents as partners in the project of supporting young people.

Before we started working on the Parent Connector Network in Winter 2011, we worked with families and teachers in other efforts to improve parent-school and parent-parent connections. Work informing the Parent Connector Network began in a 2009-10 series of Reading Nights and Parent Dialogues, and a Multilingual Coffee Hour that continued in 2010-11. (We tell the full story in the next section! See Parent connector network/ahas!)

Most of all, we had to make a lot of friends with other parents who cared deeply about including everyone.

Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!

Over the course of the project, we had the following communication and implementation ahas, and project turning points. An “aha” refers to the moments when we said “Aha! we’ve figured out something really helpful!” Or, “Aha! Now we understand!” “Turning points” refer to moments when we used these ahas to make changes to our work. To read the full accounting (our main documentation of this project!), see main article: Parent connector network/ahas

Findings/Endpoints

Here's where we describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion! Three sections below:

Concrete communication improvements

What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?

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We are proud to say that the Parent Connector vision and project is now part of the unified Healey School's school site plan. We have a core of volunteer Connectors making calls and ready for fall. We have two great leaders. We hope that one of the two, already a Creole-speaking staff member, will be supported by the school 10 hrs/week as a part-time parent liaison to handle parent needs forwarded by the Connectors and to oversee the information translation process we’ve come up with:

INFRASTRUCTURE JPEG HERE.

We are finishing our hotline so that Translators of the Month can easily upload updates this fall. We’re honing a Googledoc collecting schoolwide information for them to translate. We’re also teaming up with PTA leaders, who will begin to offer email/listserv training to parents this fall to address this key barrier to schoolwide communication.

Main communication realizations and implementation realizations

At this point, what are our main realizations about improving communications in public education? (Here are our main thoughts on OneVille’s research questions.)

What big changes would we recommend re. improving the “communication infrastructure” of public education, so that more people can collaborate in student success?)

What’s the main thing we’d recommend to other communities or schools implementing similar innovations? (What would we expand or do differently were we to do this again?)

What do we plan to do next?

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MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: Along with strong intentions to include all families, schools need systems for getting information to and from everyone. Diverse schools particularly do. Structural barriers to information-sharing (in both directions) mean that partnerships that could happen, don’t. Structural improvements can help include everyone and send the message that everyone is to be included.

Communication from school to home and back again is a huge issue in any diverse school, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training. Today, getting information to all families and get input from all families requires using some technology -- basic technology, that includes rather than excludes! More broadly, though, it also requires creating a thoughtful infrastructure tapping (and in some cases, paying for) a key local resource: bilingualism. Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but structural disorganization certainly can block communication too. The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation: otherwise, stuff doesn’t get translated despite good intentions.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Overall, we’ve learned that committed and diverse parents can be expert innovators of school infrastructure for including all parents because they have a full range of experiences from which to brainstorm those supports. The Connectors themselves are a key local resource, as people willing to be on call to answer other parents' questions in their language and to (monthly) share information that requires additional explanation.

Together, the Connectors (with advice from many other parents and staff consulted over the two years) fleshed out a list of components of the necessary “infrastructure” to make schoolwide translation efficient, and to make the Connectors' volunteer role not overly time-consuming.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Because a school with good family relationships serves everyone better, the people who share a school can, will, and should volunteer their time to help the school and other families communicate. But only up to a certain point.

In the Schoolwide Communication project in general, we repeatedly hit up against a core issue: how much time will parents volunteer to support connections between families, and between families and school? Schools can’t rely upon volunteers too much. The key issue we addressed in the Parent Connector Project was the line between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. How to tap those resources without overtaxing volunteers, and without asking volunteers to do the sort of work that really should be done by paid professionals? We’ve been exploring a hybrid of volunteer efforts to “connect” to other parents and “infrastructure” that helps school staff get info out and address individual parents’ needs. In particular, our final aha of the year was that the core "loop" of communication on serious parent needs may have to be covered by paid staff, freeing volunteers to be friends, info-sharers and people linking other parents TO paid staff. Volunteers shouldn't be asked to ensure that parents get Special Education services for their kids or legal assistance for their families. But volunteers may be able to do something no staff member can do so easily: build friendships that glue people together as partners in student success.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Nothing can stop a creative group of committed parents.

Technological how-tos

Describe "how to" use every tool you used, so that others could do the same. Describe "how to" make every tool you made!

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We’re using a Googledoc as one organized place where the principal and school leaders put info that most needs translation each month. We use Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. We use some Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs.

We’ve experimented with robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls (ConnectEd), but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Still, as a group of non-technologists, Googleform and Googlespreadsheet setup took us a bit of learning! (describe? screen shots?)

Hotline setup was a task for Seth. In April, we were still sitting at Seth’s computer talking into it, or, those of us with Audacity on our computers could record from home and send Seth the files. Over the summer, we xxxxx. SETH ADD HERE!

Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live

If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!

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Consider the current and needed schoolwide communication infrastructure at your school:

-Where do you put school information and parent ideas so that everyone in the school can see them? Can everyone who needs to get and share important school information, get and share it? If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?

-What infrastructure do you have for translation and interpretation, in particular?

-How can local bilingualism be treated as a key resource in connecting people to each other and to information?

-How can you organize volunteers to pitch in on translation and interpretation in a way that doesn't take too much of their time?

-What tech training do volunteers need? What relationships do they need to form with each other so the work is personally rewarding?

-How could you eventually make more efficient translation/interpretation/parent liaison efforts a task of school staff? (In our case, we streamlined a way of getting school information out to everyone and then argued for one of our Connectors to be made a staff liaison/Lead Connector for 10 hrs/week to run it. Her part-time job will include running the Connector project!)