A Door-to-Door Push to Get Parents Involved at Struggling Schools
Tameka Carter, left, and Bliss Requa-Trautz, went building to building in the Edenwald housing projects in the Bronx, knocking on doors of families with children in Public School 112. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times
At Public School 298 in Brooklyn, where the principal invites parents to visit classrooms once a month, typically fewer than 10 percent of them will.
The New Millennium Business Academy Middle School in the Bronx spent much of the summer trying to track down the families of incoming sixth graders to invite them to an orientation. Just over half of the families turned up, which the principal considered a victory.
At DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, attendance at parent association meetings was so paltry that the school began raffling off Thanksgiving turkeys and supermarket gift cards to entice people to come.
With the second full school year of his administration beginning on Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio is already under pressure to show improvement at these schools, which are among 62 low-performing schools targeted by the state for possible takeover. One of the keys to transforming them, his administration believes, is to get parents to show up more by turning schools into one-stop community centers offering services like medical and dental clinics, adult courses and counseling.
It is a marked contrast to the Bloomberg administration, which was more focused on trying to identify weak teachers, principals and even whole schools and then replacing them.
The de Blasio administration believes so strongly in its own approach that it spent a million dollars in recent months to train parents in organizing techniques and to hire people to knock on the doors of roughly 35,000 parents of students at struggling schools, to tell them about the changes and urge them to take a bigger role.
“Bringing families into their child’s education is essential,” Mr. de Blasio’s schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, said. “Study after study shows that family engagement improves student performance and attendance.”
So on a hot afternoon in late August, one of the outreach workers, Tameka Carter, a single mother of four from Brooklyn who said she had always been active in her children’s schools, went from building to building in the Edenwald housing project in the Bronx, knocking on doors of families with children in Public School 112.
When Ms. Carter did find the parents who were listed on her clipboard, typically mothers, they listened as she explained what it meant that their child’s school was becoming a “community school.”
She asked them to rate, on a scale of one to five, how much they would value potential new programs, like medical services, tutoring or summer activities. One of the questions asked how they would value “an opportunity for parents to sit at the decision-making table,” which left one parent perplexed.
“Meaning?” Maria Pena, a 31-year-old mother of three, asked.
Ms. Carter explained that she could “sit at the table” with P.S. 112’s A Door-to-Door Push to Get Parents Involved at Struggling Schools - The New York Times: