Summary: 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

Click here for the Overview and key findings on this project; click here for the Expanded story on this project.

Parent Connector Network Model:

What communication issues did this project address?

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

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. Over the course of two years, we met parents particularly committed to improving schoolwide communication and linked them in to the effort.

In 2009-10, we worked on three main efforts: a series of Reading Nights linking parents across a Kindergarten hallway to share information about early reading strategies; Parent Issue Dialogues, supporting parents to debate a crucial school issue; and, Multilingual Coffee Hours supporting parents to talk to each other and the principal in their own languages.

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. So, the Parent Connector Network was the 2010-11 focus of this overall Working Group exploring schoolwide communication at the Healey. 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.

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

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.

Why is it important to improve communications?

What we found:

• ¡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 distributed, translated, 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 in particular, improving communications -- and strengthening relationships between families and educators -- requires creating a standing infrastructure for effectively tapping a key local resource: bilingualism.

How do parent connectors work? How would it be implemented?

• If willing, bilingual parents ("Connectors") might volunteer time to build relationships with immigrant families who speak their language and help get information to and from them. Click here to see how we got to this point.
• Connectors can call 10 other families once a month to share key information from the principal/school and to ask questions about any issues parents are facing.
• “Translators of the month” connectors can help prioritize and translate school information collected on a Googledoc by school leaders and staff.
• That information can go onto a multilingual hotline (contact us if you want to create one!) or, schoolwide listserv, or onto handouts in backpacks.
• (Here's a link to the story of how we got to the point of testing this “infrastructure” for multilingual translation and interpretation.)

How do you know if your school could improve communication?

Questions to ask about the current system in your school:

➢ Can everyone who needs to get and share important school information, get and share it?

➢ Where do you put school information so that everyone in the school can see it?

➢ How do you share parent ideas around the school?

➢ What system do you have for translation and interpretation, in particular?

➢ How can you tap local bilingualism, either paying people to translate material or organizing bilingual 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?

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

➢ Which efforts at parent information should be a task for school staff rather than volunteers?

Click for the Overview and Key Findings on this project; click for the Expanded Story on this project.