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Building Smart Education Systems: VUE Number 26, Winter 2010
NOTE: This article was originally published in Skills for Smart Systems: VUE 17, Fall 2007.
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.
Building a Successful Collaboration between Schools and Parents
In the early 1990s, LSNA built a coalition of principals, teachers, and parents to address school overcrowding. This coalition represented an early version of the shift in strategy more community organizations are making – from confrontational organizing against school administrations to a sometimes complex but highly productive inside-outside collaboration in which ideas, buildings, and power are shared by the schools and the community, particularly parents.
LSNA’s new school-community collaboration was successful. By 1996 LSNA had won five large building additions and two new middle schools. At the coalition’s insistence, the buildings were built so that they could be used as community centers in the evenings. The social trust built by common struggle and victory laid the basis for the collaborative community-building efforts that followed.
Parents as Leaders: The Parent Mentor Program
The Parent Mentor Program was launched in 1995 and has served as the open door for many parents, particularly mothers, to become involved in their children’s schools. It began in one school, Frederick Funston, a pre-K through grade 6 school. Principal Sally Acker, who had been active in the overcrowding campaign, asked LSNA to develop a “parent mentor” internship program to involve non-working mothers and help them further their education and find jobs.
Fifteen Funston mothers were recruited into the program, trained, and placed in classrooms to work two hours daily with students under the direction of a teacher. LSNA’s initial one-week training helped mothers to see themselves as leaders, reflect on their skills, set personal goals, and commit to achieving them. It also provided the space within which to develop strong cohorts; mothers, isolated by such factors as their immigrant experience, lack of English, and small children shared common experiences and found personal support from each other.
Every applicant was accepted, regardless of education or language (many spoke only Spanish), and each was placed in a classroom where she could be helpful. They attended weekly workshops on a variety of topics and reflected together on their classroom experiences. They wrote journals. They held potlucks. They helped each other pursue their goals, usually involving learning English or returning to school. At the end of 100 hours they received a $600 stipend.
Changing the Family-School Relationship: Community Learning Centers
The parent mentors at Funston also helped plan the Community Learning Center (CLC) that was established as a result of the successful anti-overcrowding campaign. The mentors surveyed their neighborhood door-to-door, asking over five hundred families what programs they needed in an evening school-community center. LSNA raised funds to keep Funston open until 9:00 p.m. with adult education and children’s programming and hired two parents to run the CLC.
The CLC helped change the way families and school staff saw the school. Not only was the center accessible to parents (the school was close to home; classes and childcare were free; and children were tutored while their parents studied), but parents who walked freely in and out of the CLC began to see the school building as partly theirs and education as something that united their family. The CLC held Thanksgiving and Christmas parties to bring participants together. Daytime teachers got to know parents by teaching English or classes to prepare for General Educational Development (GED) tests at night, and some of the most popular classes were taught by parent mentors – whether Mexican folk dance for children or sewing for adults. The CLC was overseen by advisory boards that included parents as well as principals.
