Pasco School District
Pasco, WA
Esmeralda M. Valencia, Parent Engagement Coordinator
Lorraine Landon, Special Programs Coordinator
ATP Champion Ideas for Today’s Leaders
Leaders in Pasco School District continued an impressive history of guiding the Action Teams for Partnerships in all elementary, middle, and high schools to strengthen their partnership programs. Data from the prior year’s workshops for ATP chairpersons revealed that the school teams wanted to hear from fellow ATP Chairs and Co-chairs (“in-house experts”) who were successful in strengthening the engagement of all families. They wanted information on how to improve outreach to all parents and increase parents’ responses and participation in their child’s education. The district leaders organized this year’s summer professional development workshop to meet the ATPs’ requests with Champion Ideas.
The district Superintendent welcomed ATP chairpersons to the retreat. She discussed the importance of their leadership and teamwork to meet the goal in the district’s Strategic Plan for strong school and family engagement at all grade levels. The official plan called for schools to engage families and community partners in ways that advanced students’ reading, math, and other important skills, extra-curricular participation, on-time graduation, and personal development.
Among many Champion Ideas shared at the summer workshop, attendees heard from their fellow ATP Chairs about the following solutions to some challenges:
- Emerson Elementary School’s Video Invitations: Students used ClassDojo and other technologies to create personal videos in English and Spanish to invite their parents to attend family engagement activities.
- Ochoa Middle School’s At a Glance: ATP leaders showed how other ATPs could prepare and distribute a simple one-page calendar of all family engagement activities scheduled throughout the school year so that parents and community partners could plan their schedules to attend.
- New Horizons High School gave its ATP a local name that translated well in English (Families Connecting with Educators) and Spanish (Familias Conectadas con Educadores) (FCE). The team communicates with parents in both languages to ensure equal access to information and services. See https://www.psd1.org/domain/177).
Evaluations indicated that ATP chairs adopted or adapted some of the Champion Ideas in their next action plans to help their schools improve their partnership programs.
Read more about ATP Champion Ideas for Today’s Leaders in Promising Partnership Practices 2021.
