Parents, school a powerful team
If there’s one thing educational research has consistently agreed upon the last several decades, it’s the importance of parental school involvement in student success.
Involvement can take many forms — all with a positive impact on students — whether volunteering in the classroom, helping with homework, developing a positive parentteacher relationship or simply communicating with the child the positive value of education (Epstein & Saunders, 2002).
An article in the August 2004 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, by Nancy E. Hill and Lorraine C. Taylor, said there are two ways parental school involvement promotes student achievement.
First, working with school staff can increase parents’ skills and information. The second way is social control. Families and schools work together to agree on common behavioural and academic goals. Students then hear a consistent message about what’s expected.
In many of our schools, the encouragement of parent involvement takes the form of services to families. In some schools, parents might be invited to an evening workshop on literacy. At another, parents who don’t speak English at home might be taking language lessons.
We have career and academic counsellors at each of our high schools who can help parents and students learn how to hunt for scholarships.
This semester we added an off-campus co-ordinator to work with our high schools across the division to connect students with meaningful work experience, internship and apprenticeship opportunities that expand the educational experience well beyond the classroom walls. The system relies on partnership with the community.
Our experts in early learning are about to start their annual developmental checkups, a free service to parents of three- to five-year-olds who are new to
our school programs. These checkups give parents excellent information about the developmental skills their toddler’s already mastered and which ones might need a bit of support. Please see http://www.pallisersd.ab.ca/early-learning for the schedule. Palliser also has an amazing team of family and school liaison counsellors who share their expertise on mental health and wellness, how to support youth in distress and, when a community needs it most, how to deal with grief and loss.
Recently, our school division held an open house in Coaldale to talk about enrolment trends and the space challenges and opportunities in each of our buildings in and near town. It was an open conversation and brainstorming session in which the “education experts” in the room did less talking than we did listening to the wisdom of the crowd.
All of these examples demonstrate the vital partnership between home and school to the benefit of our students. No matter the age of your child, your involvement makes a difference.