Voices in Urban Education

Archives

Skills for Smart Systems
VUE Number 17, Fall 2007

| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |

---

EXCERPT:
Parents Building Communities in Schools

By Joanna Brown
Joanna Brown is director of education organizing at the Logan Square Neighborhood Association in Chicago.
> Author's bio

> Full article [PDF: 11 pages]
---------------------------------------

An effort to engage parents in Chicago schools results in benefits to both the schools and the parents.

On any given day, in nine public schools in Chicago's Logan Square community, about 170 parent mentors and parent tutors are in elementary school classrooms tutoring children; every evening two or three teams of parents and teachers make Literacy Ambassador home visits; about eighty mentors and several hundred other parents are attending school-based community centers to learn English or learn skills, while another sixty parents are in college classes to become bilingual teachers.

Most of these parents are immigrant mothers or the daughters of immigrants. Their schools are part of a network of schools serving low-income, largely Latino children, brought together by the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) to create schools as centers of community — and serve the needs of the immigrant students.

Enter an LSNA school and you see mothers sitting in hallways with small groups of students who are intently reading out loud. A mother comfortably enters the principal's office to remind her of a meeting. Mothers meet in a corner of the cafeteria to plan a family reading night for all. As a teacher passes by she calls — “Cati, your son was looking for you upstairs.” In the evening, 1,000 families participate in classes and activities held at the schools and managed by parents.

LSNA is the forty-five-year-old community organization of Logan Square, a mixed-income, majority Latino immigrant neighborhood of 84,000 residents on Chicago's northwest side. LSNA has forty member organizations, including churches, social service agencies, block clubs, and nine large public schools (two K–8, four K–6, one 7–8, and two high schools.) Some 8,300 students, 90 percent of whom are from low-income Latino families, study in these schools.

For more than fifteen years, LSNA has been organizing community members around education issues. In doing so, we started with some basic principles. First, as part of the 1989 Chicago school reform movement, which established elected parent-majority Local School Councils (LSCs), we knew that the Councils needed an organized community in order for their formal authority to select and hire principals on four-year contracts to be meaningful. Second, as the community group for a particular neighborhood, we had a vision of opening the doors of fortress schools and helping them function as centers of community. Third, as organizers, we were committed to listen to and value what residents wanted and to build on community strengths.

We also suspected that disparities of education, language, and income were only some of many factors that created barriers to parent involvement in schools. And we believed that transformational learning happens through experience, by doing.We also knew that we would have to raise the money to pay for whatever we built.

However, we never imagined the full results that could be achieved by deeply tapping into the strengths and skills of parents.