School Teams Work To Speak Up For Every Child
April 21, 2009 – In schools across Wake County, teams of adults work behind the scenes speaking up for every child, working with families so that students achieve academic success.
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This is the fourth in a series of reports on the six standards of family involvement in Wake Board Policy 2541
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31 minute mp3 file Share your school's best practices for communicating with families |
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6-page Acrobat file |
In schools across Wake County, teams of adults work behind the scenes speaking up for every child, working with families so that students achieve academic success.
To foster this partnership between home and school, the Wake County School Board is embracing standards of the National PTA. The PTA’s six standards for judging effective family-school partnerships are now included in Board Policy 2541.
Ann Rollins, who coordinates WCPSS Parent Liaisons and serves as Wake County PTA Council Family Involvement Chair, visited Green Elementary to talk with Principal Shelly Watson and the members of the school’s Partnership for Education Success (PES) team to talk about Standard 4: Speaking Up for Every Child - Families are empowered to be advocates for their own and other children, to ensure that students are treated fairly and have access to learning opportunities that will support their success.
“We work with families to empower them to be advocates for their children’s success,” said Rollins. “We teach them about graduating on time and career objectives and resources that are provided within the system, within the community and from other agencies.”
Green Elementary
Shelly Watson is the principal of Green Elementary, a multi track year round school in North Raleigh.
“We do a lot of things here at Green,” said Watson. “We want to make sure we are looking at each and every student to see what would hinder their academic success. We know that when we are looking at students and we’re trying to make sure they are successful in all areas of life that it starts at home. It is important for us to reach out to parents, to families, to the community to make sure that they are doing what they can for students to make sure they are successful in school.”
The Partnership for Education Success brings together school support staff and Wake County Human Services staff who work for children. When Watson and Rollins meet with the schools PES team, here are some of the members:
Catherine Cooper, Green Elementary guidance counselor
“I see myself as a facilitator for student and family success. Anything that I can do to promote them to do well in school I do. If they’re obstacles and we get together - not just me, but as a team – and creatively come together to see how we can get past those obstacles. We give them a solid knowledge base so that they have an understanding of our school language so that they can support kids here at school.”
When Cooper talked with a student about problems concentrating on schoolwork, she learned the child’s grandparent had recently passed away. She worked with the child’s parents and teacher to provide ideas for the child to cope with the loss and feel comforted and focused.
Janette Hodge, Wake County Human Services Family Support Social Worker
“I provide some resources to the family. Sometimes they have barriers and sometimes those barriers impact everyone in the household. If the parents have the support that they need, they can feel empowered and focus on supporting their child’s academic performance.”
Hodge helped a parent whose child had issues that required the attention of a pediatrician. She helped schedule the appointment with the doctor. After the visit to the doctor, she heard from the teacher the child’s academic performance improved.
Julie Doyle, Wake County Human Services School Nurse
“I would say what my role in this group is to provide a snapshot of the child’s medical issues and chronic illnesses that they might be dealing with. Many times medical issues and chronic illnesses can greatly impact a child’s success at school both in terms of academic performance and also simply just school attendance.”
Doyle works with a number of students who have chronic illnesses. She recently worked with the parents and teacher of a student to change the child’s medical routine so the child could better participate in activities in which she wanted to be involved.
Christine Meznarich, Green Elementary social worker
“My role on the committee is to kind of be the person who can go to the home while everyone else is doing their job at the school teaching classes. Oftentimes, we will have a family that we may not have gotten a lot of communication with or sometimes people don’t have a phone or they work long hours or their shift doesn’t allow us to reach them by phone and we might have a school year with very little communication from the family. Part of what I do is try to find the family in the home.”
Meznarich helped a child with attendance issues by arranging with the family to have old carpeting replaced in the home that was aggravating the child’s asthma.
Principal Watson says the classroom teacher is always the starting point for discussions on meeting a student’s needs.
“The classroom teacher has the experience of working with the child in the classroom, knowing what needs that child might have academically,” said Watson. “They can bring interventions they have put into place. They can bring the knowledge of knowing what that child needs during the day to be successful.”
From the starting point of the classroom teacher’s perspective, the PES team works together to find ways to help each child be academically successful.
Parents Offering Perspectives
While they work to resolve issues for other families, the members of the Green Elementary PES team are also parents of students in the school system.
Janette Hodge has two children in school. She says it’s important for parents to develop relationships with teachers and to respond to the flow of paperwork that comes from the school.
“My experience has been just trying to establish a good rapport with the school, especially the teachers, building a good relationship with them,” said Hodge. “Usually I’ll let the teachers know about my children’s strengths and let them know what I see at home and try to start from there. I also address concerns about while I feel confident my child can do this and I would like for my child to do that, can we work on this?”
Doyle, the school nurse, said the difficulty of dealing with her own daughter’s recovery from surgery during the school year surprised her.
“Even with all my knowledge as a nurse, it was still a rough path to try to negotiate getting her back to school and trying to have her be pain free,” said Doyle. “It was tough because it was a painful surgery. And then just negotiating all the absences that she had and trying to make up the work and the communication with the teachers really proved to be the key in that we let them know long before it happened that it was going to be happening and we kept them informed all the way through the whole process of what’s going on, what their expectations of her should be based on her limitations because of the surgery and even with all of that work, we still encountered problems that we had to deal with along the way.”
Speaking up for every child is a team of professionals - educators, social workers and nurses –who want to help families and want to help students find academic success.
Principal Watson says the team at Green Elementary is dedicated to meet the needs of students and their families.
“I think the thing that is good about this team is that they do a real good job of reaching out to those families and just making things accessible to them, making sure that they have the knowledge, making sure that any resources that family needs is available,” said Watson.
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