Schoolwide communication toolkit

CUT THIS WHOLE PAGE, I THINK. IT'S AN EXTRA PAGE THAT IS A BARRIER TO ENTRY TO THE MAIN PAGE, WHICH IS THE PARENT CONNECTOR PAGE.

Ensuring that everyone in a school can partner in student success requires overcoming structural barriers to communication between the families who share a school, and the school!

With parents, teachers, staff, and administrators at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville, we've been working toward a toolkit of tools and strategies for schoolwide communication that reaches all families across lines of language, income, background, and tech access/training.

We've decided to describe our full set of schoolwide communication efforts on the Parent Connector Network page, since that was the main outcome of our 2009-11 efforts. In that Network, all the work we had been doing for two years came together!

In that, we've been working on improving the "infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a multilingual school. As Connectors, bilingual parents use phones, Google forms, and a hotline we made, to help get information to and input from immigrant and low-income families. A multilingual coffee hour is part of the infrastructure too!

We began this work by holding Reading Nights and parent dialogues at the Healey in 2009-10.