Parent Contracts

Recently, a group of colleagues and I were discussing the changing communities of many public schools in our district. We evaluated how little some schools know the communities they exist within. This manifests itself in many ways. One way we talked about was how some schools have a bias towards parents by projecting a school-based ideal of what good parenting looks like instead of asking parents. Schools force parents to sign contracts that are constructs of the school and not based on the ideals and values of the parent. Schools make assumptions that high performing schools have high parent involvement, which is not necessarily supported by data. Globally, in fact, other countries have low parental involvement and that made my friends and I wonder how critical parent involvement in day-to-day instruction is to student performance. These parent contracts and mandatory volunteer hours could possibly silence parents and ultimately isolate some of them from their students’ education. I began thinking of some things schools can do to alleviate this parent exclusion. Schools could build a parent contract by reaching out to parents and taking input on what they value from schools and what their roles should be in the school house. Schools could send more text updates to parents and reach out on social media. Using email and flyers are outdated ways to passively communicate with parents and do not ensure a two-way conversation. Schools could hold monthly meetings with the PTSA on new strategies and initiatives that grow out of our initial efforts with parents. Lastly, we could reach out to business and community members. Being tourists in these communities does not help us engage parents or develop students into change makers. Our schools should reflect community and family values and we can only gather those values from parents and community members.