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, with input from parents across the Healey School and Jedd Cohen

Gina, Connector to Haitian Creole speaking parents

Summary

What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go? (For example: Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish? At this point, what are our main AHAs about improving communications in public education?)

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

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

Begun in Winter 2010, the Parent Connector Network is now 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 to gather school information, Google spreadsheets to track calls with parents, and a multilingual hotline we made using free software, to help ensure that information reaches immigrant and low-income families who share the school.

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. (One Connector also got calls this summer -- about summer school enrollment and about how to reach the district’s Parent Information Center to enroll a new cousin in a school.)

We also innovated the role of volunteer “Translators of the Month” who can help translate school information for a hotline made by local technologists. That translated material can then be used for other school media (listserv, handouts, flyers, etc.).

We also argued for creating a part-time liaison role (five paid hours!) for one staff Connector so that she can respond appropriately to serious or ongoing parent needs -- beyond what a volunteer parent can or should do. She also will help with a key structural issue: scheduling interpreters. We’re piloting the full combination in 2011-12.

In sum, this past year the Connectors have become key innovators of school-wide translation and interpretation infrastructure. Over the 2010-11 school year, we've been fleshing out a list of such systemic supports, which we’ve diagrammed completely here. These diagrams show that it takes real organization to ensure that communication works with multilingual families.

Our main ahas:

AHA: Along with strong intentions to include all families, diverse schools need systems -- infrastructure -- for getting information to everyone and input from everyone. If structures don’t exist to get info out and input in, information just doesn’t get translated, distributed, or shared despite good intentions. And parent-school partnerships that could happen, don’t.

AHA: Overall, we’ve learned that committed and diverse parents can be expert innovators of communication infrastructure for including all parents because they have a full understanding of communication barriers. )

AHA: In a multilingual school and district, improving translation and interpretation -- and strengthening relationships between families and educators -- requires creating a standing infrastructure for effectively tapping a key local resource: bilingualism.

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

Communication we hoped to improve

At Somerville’s Healey School (K-8), as in many U.S. schools, parents hail from across the globe and speak many languages. Language barriers keep parents from being equally informed about school issues, events, and even educational opportunities. So do disparities in tech access, tech training, and time -- as well as gaps in personal relationship and connections. Everyone at the Healey talked about needing better school-home and parent-parent communication, particularly to fully include immigrant families, families without computer access/knowledge, and families who couldn’t or didn’t show up often in person at the school.

So, 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. Info out, input in!

The Healey School enrolls a full U.S. range of families with different communication habits and needs. Some email the principal and Superintendent regularly. Some parents have no computers and no internet. 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 need. One Portuguese-speaking dad worked such long hours he didn't even have time to come to school to post a sign saying he wanted to find and pay another parent to help him drive his daughter to school. (His "Connector" made the sign for him.) One Spanish-speaking parent told her Connector she’d been trying for a year to meet with her child’s teacher in person.

In contrast, some families, particularly English-speaking families, volunteer many hours in classrooms during the school day and so get regular access to their child’s teacher. Many such families also are on committees that meet after school and so, take the opportunity then to contribute ideas to the school. Over the years, we saw that families who saw each other regularly at face to face school events also made friends, joined listservs, signed up in directories, and showed up at next events.

Because language barriers particularly have excluded many 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. We've also been working to build personal relationships between bilingual parents and recent 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.

AHA: Because each innovation the Connectors started needed other components to work effectively, we have come to think in terms of creating an "infrastructure" for multilingual communication (and low-cost translation and interpretation) in a school.

Our work, and our AHAs

' What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? What were the main communication ahas and implementation ahas, and turning points?

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As a multilingual group of parents and staff (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 sort of systemic 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 as part of the Parent Connector Network infrastructure. We learned a huge amount in that work and we built relationships that enabled the development of the Parent Connector Network. Click here for that backstory!

Most of all, we had to make friends with other parents and staff who cared deeply about including everyone. These friends became key partners in innovation!

Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!

AHA: 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.

A key issue we addressed in the Parent Connector Project was the line between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can and 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 cost-effective hybrid of volunteer efforts to connect parents to other parents and “infrastructure” that includes paid school staff.

In particular, our final aha of the year was that communication on individual parents’ serious personal needs may have to be covered by paid staff, freeing volunteers to be friends, info-sharers and links TO paid staff. Volunteers shouldn't be asked to ensure that parents get Special Education services for their children 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.

AHA: Today, systems for getting information to multilingual families and input from all families can absolutely be improved using some very basic technology – in a hybrid with face to face relationships! That’s because technology can help people get a bit more organized. But only if people are shown how to use it.

Even in our own efforts to translate documents and call parents, we saw that technology could help us get organized so we didn’t waste each others’ time. Having an archive of googledocs where people keep old fliers so they don’t have to be translated again saved us hours. So did an online spreadsheet where we collectively chose point Connectors whose role it was to call a bounded set of families, and provided their numbers. (When one Connector was using a paper spreadsheet of her “assigned” families’ names and numbers, it kept getting misplaced and at one point was lost.) Organized translation and interpretation is of course far more cost- and time-effective than a scattered process where no one knows who is translating what or interpreting what for whom! It’s really about getting the resource of bilingualism in the right place at the right time.

Google Translate helped some of us quickly translate a document and then check it for accuracy; we made a Googledoc because we needed one place where school leaders could put the many things that ideally would get translated (and then triage that information in a face to face meeting). But people need to know how to use each tool! Otherwise, glitches in training slow things down even more.

AHA: Tech just helps extend the ultimate resource: relationships. One of our Connectors had an AHA that others echoed across the OneVille Project: “My main conclusion is that relationships matter and they are what makes everything work.”

Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps

We are proud to say that the Parent Connector vision and project is now part of the Healey School's school site plan. We have a core of volunteer Connectors making calls this fall, lead Connectors in each language, and two current/former HGSE graduate students working to support the effort while it solidifies. The new principal has agreed that one of our Connectors, Gina, already a young Creole-speaking staff member, will be supported by the school five hrs/week as a part-time parent liaison to handle parent needs forwarded by the Connectors and to oversee the multilingual communication process we’ve come up with here.

We are finishing our hotline so that Translators of the Month can easily upload updates this fall. We’re honing a Googledoc where school leaders put schoolwide information for Translators to translate on to the hotline. We’re also creating a Googledoc of basic contact info/citywide parent services info all Connectors need to know. We’ve helped the principal make her a fall parent communication form that will help parents sign up to get a Connector, make it easier to get parents’ phone numbers, and allow parents to record their preferences for contact (texting? listserv? classroom listserv?) and indicate whether they need email training. 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.

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” for multilingual communication. The Connectors themselves have become seen as 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 more explanation.

Our next step this fall is to to pilot the full infrastructure we’ve developed for multilingual communication, while adding in a next piece: PTA-run parent email/listserv training. We plan to:

a) pilot use of our open source hotline, to support bilingual parent “Translators of the Month” to translate information about events, issues, and opportunities;

b) finish testing our Parent Connector Network, in which bilingual parents make monthly calls to help get information to and input from immigrant and low-income families; Connectors will also invite parents to our Multilingual Coffee hour and to the hotline;

c) test a model where a Parent Liaison follows up on specific parent needs, helps with scheduling interpreters, and coordinates Translators of the Month for the hotline;

d) help create a sustainable model where the PTA trains parents to get Gmail accounts, use a school listserv, and use Google Translate to translate listserv information.

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

What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

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

-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?

-Where do you put school information and parent ideas so that everyone in the school can see them?

-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?

-How can you build on parent-parent relationships to pull all parents into school events and conversation? Would a Connector-like project work at your school?

-What tech training do parents need in order to get information? How could you help all parents get this training?

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

-Which efforts at parent information should be a task for school staff rather than volunteers? (In our case, we mapped out a system for multilingual communication in the school and then argued for one of our Connectors to be made a staff liaison/Lead Connector for 5 hrs/week to run the parts of it volunteers couldn’t run.)

Technological how-tos

Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

We’re using a Googledoc as one organized place where the principal and school leaders put info that most needs translation each month. (Note: to use googledocs, users sometimes have to get gmail accounts. We use Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. And, to keep things simple, we now use the same spreadsheets for Connectors to record parents’ needs after they make calls home. As a group of non-technologists, we had to learn how to set up Googlespreadsheets. See our short VIDEO TALKING THROUGH THESE? Or, link to Google instructions? COULD ANA AND GINA MAKE THIS? We used Google Translate for some first-pass translations, but bilingual parents still had to correct the translations: http://translate.google.com/support/ (Or, for immigrant parents, should we make a video and narrate?

We’ve experimented with robocalls home, using Connect-Ed, the district’s existing system for school-home calls. Here’s an instruction sheet from Somerville’s Parent Information Center explaining to administrators how to use Connect-Ed: POST Regina’s sheet here??. Remember that in our case, we targeted robocalls to one language group at a time instead of recording all four at once, because robocalls often cut off after the first two languages (and because Portuguese and Haitian Creole were always last!). We also asked Connectors to record some robocalls in their friendly parent voices, which drew some parents to PTA night!

Maria, Connector to Portuguese-speaking parents, and Seth, local technologist, working together on a hotline recording

Hotline setup was a task for Seth, so he explains the programming [[here]. In April, we were still sitting at Seth’s computer talking into it -- see photo! Or, those of us with Audacity on our computers could record from home and send Seth the files. Over the summer, Seth finished the hotline so that people could call it and record to it. SETH ADD HERE AND MAKE A VIDEO EXPLAINING HOW TO DO THE HOTLINE?