Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

What aspect of communication did we want to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?

In the Parent Connector Network, as in our broader schoolwide communication toolkit, our goal was to figure out ways to better include all parents in a multilingual K-8 school.

In the second half of the 20010-11 school year, with a team of parents and administrators in a K-8 school in Somerville, we developed this "component" of systemic support for interpreting and translating information. Begun in earnest in Winter 2011, the Parent Connector Network is a parent-led effort (in partnership with school administration) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) to more recently immigrated parents via a phone tree.

Because language barriers particularly exclude parents from full participation, we've been fleshing out a full list of systemic supports for more effective interpretation and translation across a multilingual school. The Parent Connector Network is a key component!

What is the main communication improvement we made?

We now have recruited 3 Spanish-speaking, 3 Portuguese-speaking, and 2 Creole-speaking Connectors. Each Connector is calling approximately 10 families once a month to share key information from the principal and to ask questions about issues Connectors see arising among parents. The Connectors are also on call for questions at any time.

The Connectors have also become key innovators of translation and interpretation infrastructure schoolwide. We spent late spring 2011 finishing a full list of components to such infrastructure!

What's our main aha about improving the communication infrastructure of public education?

Above all, improving translation and interpretation requires getting more organized about effectively using a key local resource: bilingualism!

The Basics: What did we work on, and why?

At the Healey School in Somerville (K-8), parents hail from across the globe and speak many languages. In addition to barriers of language, disparities in tech access, tech training, and time keep parents from being equally informed about school issues and events.

Starting in winter 2011, we recruited Connectors -- bilingual parents (and one young staff member exploring the career of a parent liaison) who had, over the prior year, shown particular interest in reaching out to immigrant parents or translating public information so they could access it. As a team of parents, we met with the principal and started getting ongoing advising from parents schoolwide at our multilingual coffee hours. Our work was to test necessary ways that parents could reach out to other parents -- what info we would and would not translate for free, how many school-home communications were necessary a month, how to use existing school tools for parent outreach, and more, particularly for a multilingual community where not everyone uses computers.

(BLOG POSTS HERE?)

We met as a force of Connectors as often as possible, and emailed each other multiple times weekly. After someone suggested a hotline as a solution at one multilingual coffee hour, Seth prototyped one and we started recording updates from the principal and answers to parents' Frequently Asked questions. In late spring, we joined brainstorming forces with parents from Somerville's Welcome Project (a nonprofit focused on empowering immigrants in Somerville, housed in the Mystic Housing Development down the hill from the Healey school). A parent group had formed there that also wanted to focus on translation and interpretation in Somerville, so we joined our conversations and kept fleshing out the full set of components of schoolwide translation and interpretation infrastructure.

The Parent Connector Network is one of the key "components" -- it's connection, human-style! In the Parent Connector network, we are working to ensure equal access to school information and also working to build personal relationships between bilingual parents and immigrant parents, that we hope will serve to bring more people into school events and leadership.

What are some particularly interesting findings?

Hear some words here from our Lead Connector and our Information Coordinator: (VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH TONA OR GINA?)

Hear some words here from some of our Connectors (EVERYBODY ELSE? VIDEOTAPE AT THE NEXT CONNECTOR MEETING?)

The Healey School really does enroll a full U.S. range of families who are deeply empowered in their home-school communications (e.g., middle-class parents who email the principal constantly to get his attention, and people left out of the most basic communications of schooling (while some middle-class parents at the Healey design technology for a living, some have no computers and no internet.) A listserv has long enrolled only some. Sporadic 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.

Time is also of the essence: some families have time/resource to volunteer countless hours during the school day. In contrast, one Portuguese-speaking dad we knew of worked such long hours he didn't even have time to come to school to post a paper 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. (INTERVIEW WITH MARIA ON THIS?)

Communication from school to home is a huge issue in any diverse school, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training. In an era when most people work too much to talk face to face very often, how do we get information to all families and get input from all families?

We see one key as efficient organization of a key local resource: bilingualism.

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. There are other pieces of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation in a multilingual school that tap local bilingualism as well. We’re prototyping a hotline (using open source software and the Twilio API) allowing volunteer Translators of the Month (also bilingual parents, and maybe, students) to verbally translate information all parents need to know (in Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish). Bilingual parents have noted that translating material into their languages verbally – so, speaking it on to a hotline -- is easier than doing it word for word from paper to paper. So far, we have parents coming to speak into a computer (see photo!). We hope to hone the hotline so that translators can record to it from home.

POST PHOTO OF MARIA HERE!

We're working on other components of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation: a Googledoc as one organized place where principal, school leaders, put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month, by Translators of the Month and Connectors; Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. Robocalls (ADD SCREEN SHOT?) home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls, but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Small infrastructural “moves” can help: one parent noted that at another school, they put information at the top of every handout indicating where you can go to get a translation (over time, our Hotline).

The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Otherwise, disorganization means that things don’t get translated! Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but glitches certainly can block communication too. One example: because our Connector project started mid-year, we had no beginning of the year form for all parents, saying “do you want a Connector? Check here to release your number to them!” So, it took us weeks to work through the Parent Information Center (PIC) to get parents to release their numbers to other parents! (School staff had to figure out how to download a spreadsheet of language-specific numbers for PIC staff from X2, the district’s “student information system”; then the PIC staff had to make the calls home to get parents’ permission to release numbers to the Connectors; then, finally, Connectors got lists and could start calling.)

A key issue we’re trying to understand is where the line is between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. Translation and interpretation are civil rights in federally funded education, so the District has to pay for translating all important parent information (and it must pay for interpretation at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply organizing resources more effectively. The Turlock Unified School District in California]] trains and employs parents as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). Which communications could trained adults handle particularly effectively, and at a lower cost than sending everything to the PIC?

=Process: If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about?

(in this section, document: How has this co-design effort taken shape, and what of that process might others, elsewhere, need to replicate? What have been the stumbling blocks in the process?)

THIS PART IS PARTICULARLY NOT FLESHED OUT YET

Our design process has been fully collaborative and ethnographic. It has taken us two years to fully understand and, preliminarily flesh out the full "infrastructure" necessary to support better translation and interpretation schoolwide.

To get here, we worked with families and teachers in several other design efforts to improve the core communication infrastructure for sharing information across parents and between school and parents.

Basically, as parents, we participated in both successful and unsuccessful communications in the school while trying to figure out how to improve it.

We began in fall 2009 creating Reading Nights to link parents across a Kindergarten hallway in face to face efforts to share information on reading with young children. Our events were social, and academic. We met parents who formed the core of the working group that continued to work on schoolwide communication. And, we practiced communicating between school and home to advertise events in multiple languages. (LINK TO CONSUELO'S DOCUMENT HERE. . ) We often had trouble getting parents to reading nights because a) we didn't know that the school's "robocall" system could call a targeted subset of parents in their language; many of the parents in the hallway were not on the magnet program's listserv. We pasted up signs and invited people personally in the hallway. . . . . . .HOW MUCH TO SAY ON READING NIGHT? I HAVE A LOT OF NOTES ON IT. USE HERE OR NOT?!

To supplement the typically English-dominated meetings with the principal, we also created a multilingual coffee hour model, under the guidance of our friend Consuelo Perez, a parent partner particularly committed to finding creative ways of empowering immigrant parents. The multilingual coffee hour with the principal is now a place where people take time for translation and amplify languages other than English. (ADD INTERVIEW HERE WITH LUPE OR IRMA, ON WHAT IT HAS MEANT TO HAVE AN EXPLICITLY MULTILINGUAL COFFEE HR?) STUMBLING BLOCKS HERE?

In a number of community dialogues, we realized just how pervasive problems of communication were to parents being fully included in schools. (LINK TO SOME DOCUMENTATION FROM MAY 5 MEETING)

We also attempted to hold "Get an Email" nights at the Healey, a puzzle piece that needs further development. Especially in a community where there are many community-oriented technologists (LINK TO THEIR ORGS OR NOT?!), there's really no reason why everyone eventually shouldn't have basic tech skills. See Computer Infrastructure

We've been brainstorming these components at our own Connector meetings among ourselves and with the principal, and also at meetings with other Working Groups at the Healey School (e.g., a "Parent, Student, and Teacher Partnership" working group and a School Climate working group that formed in 2010-11) and with those parents who came to our Multilingual Coffee Hours. Parents from our first Reading Nights have also remained key brainstorming partners.

In Spring 2011, we began to brainstorm in earnest with folks from Somerville's Welcome Project (a nonprofit focused on empowering immigrants in Somerville, housed in the Mystic Housing Development down the hill from the Healey school). A parent group formed there that has also focused on translation and interpretation in Somerville, so we've joined our conversations. In June 2011, in a retreat with principal, Connectors, we finished this full list of components of the "infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school.

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EXCESS INFO TO GATHER AND PUT SOMEWHERE

Some Connectors took immediately to using Google spreadsheets, some needed multiple calls to get them to come to training sessions on them, and some tried them and in the end, wanted to use paper and ask the Information Coordinator to retype their notes. (one Connector has her daughter help her get her email; another uses her husband's computer to check hers). Other glitches got in the way: Connectors who had Yahoo accounts rather than gmail accounts couldn't open the spreadsheets and didn't know why or ask! But over time, we've realized what training is needed and, which tech uses aren't really that necessary. We'll see over time whether the Google form for recording parent needs is useful, or not.

We Connectors need to communicate regularly with each other (to determine monthly scripts for calls, for example), and we've also found that unsurprisingly, email links email-obsessed Connectors far more successfully than those who don't like to access it routinely (this breaks down along class lines, as well). Some Connectors themselves require regular phone calls. Our youngest partner and some of us prefer texts, as well. and, we all needed occasional face to face meetings to stay interested in the project!

We created this Googleform for keeping tabs on parent calls, since a major issue in schools is parents mentioning needs that don't receive a response. Tona reworked it so it wasn’t set up as if there was a serious issue each time, but is more of a general recording space.

We're doing a call home by all Connectors before the year ends – to gather information on “how are the interactions w/ your teachers going? How is translation and interpretation going?”

Lead Connector and Information Coordinator are planning to organize a summer training for Connectors, by principal, on how the school functions.