Enhancing Parental Involvement in Wilmington DE

 

Sherman N. Miller

Delaware State University

Education Doctorate Student at University of Delaware

11/7/2003

ABSTRACT

 

            A pilot program is proposed to enhance Wilmington parental involvement in their children’s education. This proposal focuses on using local community centers as meeting places for parent– teacher conferences. The goal is to make a five-year assessment of improved parental involvement in public school education after parental participation in parent-teacher conferences held routinely in neighborhood community centers. Five years is postulated to permit ample time for positive results to become the new norm in communication between inner-city parents and school officials. 

The City of Wilmington DE’s Mayor’s office will obtain data from the State of Delaware Education Department that reveals the performance level of Wilmington students in New Castle County’s metropolitan public schools. This academic performance data will offer a baseline to gauge the future success or failure of Wilmington public school students. Wilmington students’ performance data will be published in a special edition of the publication entitled, “KIDS COUNT in Delaware” that is expected in the first quarter of 2004.
INTRODUCTION

“Research indicates that family involvement in schools increases student achievement. … The benefits of parent and family involvement include higher test scores and grades, better attendance, more completion of homework, more positive attitudes and behavior, higher graduation rates, and greater enrollment in higher education,[1]” writes J.G. Caplan. Thus, parental involvement is paramount in the success of children in today’s public schools.

K. Cotton and K.R. Reed reveal that the act of parental involvement is more important than the socioeconomic level of the parents in the child’s academic success. “… Parents often begin their participation doubting that their involvement can make much difference, and they are generally very gratified to discover what an important contribution they are able to make. In this connection, it is important for school people and parents to be aware that parent involvement supports students' learning, behavior, and attitudes regardless of factors such as parents' income, educational level, and whether or not parents are employed. That is, the involvement of parents who are well-educated, well-to-do, or have larger amounts of time to be involved has not been shown to be more beneficial than the involvement of less-advantaged parents. All parent involvement works and works well. [2]”

The above comments suggest that parental involvement is a key ingredient in helping children become successful in school. They also suggest that where student poor performance is pervasive, parental involvement must be encouraged. However, what can be done when students are not succeeding and there are no neighborhood schools in which parents can establish an emotional link?

 

METHOLOGY

            A pilot program to establish two inner-city Wilmington community centers as parent-teacher’s educational meeting places will be recommended.  

An effort is made to establish the current academic performance assessment of the children living in the City of Wilmington, Delaware, to have a baseline for judging future academic improvement.

DISCUSSION

The question becomes how to bring the benefits of parental involvement in the public school education to public school children living in the City of Wilmington, DE, where neighborhood schools are nonexistent? The Wilmington School District was disbanded in 1978 when four New Castle County school districts absorbed the city children, and school busing to desegregate racially identifiable schools eliminated the neighborhood school concept.

Today, a principal architect in the 1978 Wilmington desegregation effort, Jeff Raffel, director of the University of Delaware School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, collects miniature buses that symbolize the shift from neighborhood schools. (Laponte 2002) writes, “Raffel first began collecting school buses, not full-size but miniature ones, and other school bus keepsakes after he got involved in the desegregation of Delaware schools, which used busing to integrate public schools in New Castle County. As executive director of a government-appointed committee, he helped successfully implement a federal court order, which led to the desegregation and reorganization of the Wilmington and surrounding suburban school districts.[3]  …”

Wilmington Community Centers Parental Involvement Pilot Project

Parental involvement in children’s lives is paramount to children’s success in school. This means there is a need to appreciate some of the forces that may impede parental involvement and offer remedies around these problems. In a discussion with Interviewee A, this person argued that a key problem in public schools today is, “babies having babies.[4]” This person highlighted that the high school dropouts lack the educational background to discuss problems with teachers and they may shun opportunities to meet with teachers. Some parents will only visit when they are forced to do so because of a disciplinary action being taken against their child.

Parents, who are dropouts themselves, may attempt to circumvent this educational chasm by bringing community activists or community center advocates with them in meetings with school administrators. Interviewee B says babies having babies is a problem with getting Wilmington parental involvement with the schools. Parents’ academic backgrounds are at a distinct disadvantage in discussing with teachers who may use educational jargon that is well over the heads of the poorly educated parents. Interviewee B has acted as a parental interpreter on visits to public schools where she translates teachers’ comments into laymen language for the parents to understand.  This parental advocate contends that this interpreter role is especially important in cases where special education is the issue.[5] However, Interviewee A says that sometimes community activists have as a hidden agenda to be abusive to school officials to appear tough in the eyes of under-educated parents. This detrimental behavior must be addressed by forcing the community activist out the meeting.

Interviewee B says that school administrators from one school will come to their community center to meet with parents. “Parents are lined up waiting to see the school officials.” Furthermore, Interviewee B feels that if parents are to come to the community centers, they must also receive good news on a regular basis.

Interviewee C points out that a potential problem with employing a home visit scheme to reach parents. Part of their caseworkers’ charter is home visits. However, clients generally feel this is very intrusive in their homes. Interviewee C says that clients attempt to avoid them because they will monitor how people are living during any home visit.  Interviewee C also says that the same school that visited the Interviewee B’s community center also had a program with them that appeared to work well. This program is being rekindled because the school is facing a number of suspensions and parents must discuss student problems with school officials before suspended children are permitted to return to school. [6]

The one school that visits the community centers has a desire to meet parents of children who are suspended. That may be the reason that the change was not solid. J.P. Kotter offers a thought to ponder here. “A culture truly changes only when a new way of operating has been shown to succeed over some minimum period of time. Trying to shift the norms and values before you have created the new way of operating does not work. The vision can talk of a new culture. You can create new behaviors that reflect a desired culture. But those behaviors will not become norms, will not take hold, until the very end of the process.[7]”

Interviewee D is the chief of operations at a neighborhood community center in the poorest section of the City of Wilmington. This person laid out why children are not performing up to standard in the public schools:

• Parents are irresponsible or too busy to take an interest in their children.
• Discipline is lost in schools today.
• Removal of prayer from public schools at the start of the day destroyed accountability to a higher authority.
• Children are able to wear whatever dress they desire (gangster clothing, and so on).
• Children can say whatever they desire whenever they wish to say it.
• Students intimidate teachers because these teachers have no leverage over these children.
• Many teachers have to worry about bodily harm and lawsuits for attempting to discipline students. [8]

Holistic looks at the comments presented above suggest the need for city community centers in each metropolitan school district to become hosting locations for inner-city parent and teacher meetings. There needs to be a pilot program at a center that has hosted parent-teacher meetings in the past and one that has never hosted any significant school activities other than perhaps a test in the last five years.

Pilot Community Center Parent-Teacher Meeting Program

            Many Wilmington Community Centers have faced budget cuts in the present down economy, so they may need a pledge of financial support for a minimum of five years to maintain their ability to be able to handle any significant parent-teacher meeting efforts. Some community centers may have transportation vehicles or they may offer parents bus tokens or even cab fare depending on the special circumstance.

            Philanthropic individuals and foundations should be broached on underwriting the pilot program. The schools should be challenged to offer some financial support. The mayor’s office should encourage the General Assembly to underwrite the bulk of the funds to help upgrade the educational improvement of the Wilmington labor force to help encourage new businesses to move to Delaware.

            Since community centers may service different racial and ethnic groups, each community center should devise its own parent-teacher effort with the ideas in mind from  “12 Things Parents Should Know[9]” by Parent Leadership Associates.  Some of the twelve items parents should know are: “Your involvement matters – a lot;” “you can be involved in many ways;” “children need you;” “schools need you;” “you should be told clearly how your child’s school is doing;” “and so on.” Common issues of food and transportation should be direct budgeted items.

            In the first two years, the pilot program is limited to two community centers. Each center is allocated 15,000 dollars per year to underwrite transportation (community center vehicles, buses, and taxi cabs), gifts (toiletries, paper towels, and so on), food, meeting rooms, and clean-up cost for the first two years to assess the cost of operation. Poor parents or guardians of all students living in the neighborhoods serviced by the community center will have access to financial help to participate in the parent-teacher efforts. Two major efforts that attract a number of parents are to be undertaken during the academic year. Community centers will be expected to turn out parents in their neighborhoods for the major functions. The community centers also will provide meeting locations for individual parent-teacher conferences throughout the academic year. One elementary, middle, and high school servicing students from pilot community centers’ neighborhoods will be encouraged to participate in the pilot program.

            In year three, expand the pilot program to include two additional community centers replete with elementary, middle, and high school covering their community. Also, seek long-term funding through General Assembly, New Castle County, and the City of Wilmington appropriations.

Establish Performance Base for Wilmington Public School Students

There needs to be some assessment of where Wilmington’s children stand today in the metropolitan public school education area. What is their academic performance in this new desegregated paradigm?

            The old Wilmington School district was disbanded when court ordered busing to achieve school desegregation became the norm in New Castle County, Delaware. City students were placed into one of four suburban districts. The rise of the metropolitan school district means that data unique to the City of Wilmington is now lost. Aggregate reporting on student performance is the norm. This aggregate reporting becomes especially bone chilling when Wilmington residents realize that their children’s progress cannot be measured because there is no base performance level on which to compare data.

In 1999, Debra Moffitt, writing in the Wilmington News Journal, offered a disquieting assessment of the academic performance of students living in the City of Wilmington. She reported, “... academic incentive  The average [Wilmington] city high school student had a “D” average last year and fewer than one in five seniors had plans for college.^[10]”

            A publication entitled, “KIDS COUNT in Delaware Fact Book 2000-2001” does not offer data to assess progress of public school students living in the City of Wilmington. Dowshen, S.A. & Jarrell, T.W., offer a 2000 message that is difficult to link with today’s education reality. “…At KIDS COUNT, we do not want you to think of this publication as just a report, but rather as a tool to guide, direct and motivate policy makers, advocates and the public to do what they can to improve the quality of life for Delaware’s children.[11] …” What is disturbing is that their Table 46 that is entitled, “Teens Not in School and Not in the Labor Force,” is based on the 1990 U.S. Census.

In an attempt to assess the 2003 progress of Wilmington students, it became apparent that there was no credible data on these students in a form that would be useful for analysis of progress or retrenchment.  A Wilmington city council person and a Delaware state senator were asked to request this information from the Delaware State Department of Education. These efforts were fruitless. The University of Delaware Education Department was asked if they had information on the performance of the City of Wilmington students in the public schools and they revealed that they did not have this data.

What was apparent with requesting this information from solely first level local politicians was that they didn’t appreciate its immediate importance; therefore, there needed to be a higher-level requester to obtain it. Kotter’s (1996) principle on “Error #2 Failing to Create A Sufficient Powerful Guiding Coalition[12]” was violated.  This suggested that this missing data problem needed to be brought to the attention of the Mayor of Wilmington.

In a discussion with John Rago (2003), who is the Press Secretary for the mayor of the city of Wilmington, a case was made on the inability to judge success or failure of Wilmington students in the suburban metropolitan districts without some performance data.  Agreement was reached to broach the city’s education personnel with the problem. In a follow up discussion, it was agreed that the city education personnel will locate the data on Wilmington children and a special edition of “KIDS COUNT in Delaware” will be published with this new data.[13] This new special edition of “KIDS COUNT in Delaware” is expected in the first quarter of 2004.

SUMMARY

            A pilot program is proposed to enhance parental involvement of Wilmington parents in their children’s education. This proposal focuses on using local community centers as meeting places for parents – teachers. The goal is to make a five-year assessment of improved parental involvement in public school education after parent-teacher meetings are held routinely in neighborhood community centers. Five years is recommended to permit sufficient time for hopefully positive results to become the new norm in communication between inner-city parents and school officials. 

            The mayor’s office of the City of Wilmington will obtain data revealing how well Wilmington students are performing in the metropolitan public schools. This data will offer a baseline upon which to gauge the future success or failure of Wilmington public school students. Wilmington students’ performance data will be published in a special edition of the publication entitled, “KIDS COUNT in Delaware.” A lesson from Michael Fullan (2001) in his book entitled, “Leading in a Culture of Change,” offers direction on the importance of disaggregated data to understanding subgroups’ performance when he discusses “assessment literacy.”

            Fullan writes, “… We define assessment literacy as consisting of the capacity of teachers and principals to examine student performance data and make critical sense of them (to know good work when they see it, to understand achievement scores [for example, concerning literacy], to disaggregate data to identify subgroups that may be disadvantaged or underperforming)[14] ….”