Riverside, California

Row 2 (L to R): David Ferguson, Lisa Davis, Kathleen Kennedy (NNPS Key Contact, Family Engagement Coordinator), Angie Arzaga, Carrie Mondt, Dr. Sid Salazar (Superintendent)

Alvord Community Engagement Initiative

In Alvord School District’s Strategic Plan is the statement, “We will develop a system for meaningful family involvement.” The President of the School Board planned to work closely with the Parent Engagement Office to enact the policy.  The Superintendent and Coordinator of Parent Engagement saw that joining forces would support and validate the work of schools’ ATPs. With “all hands-on deck,” work began to bring the policy statement to life.

With the help of schools’ ATPs, three large group meetings were conducted with five parents from each school. The parents identified family needs and set up steps for strengthening partnership programs, developing greater respect for diverse families, and ensuring that students were “college and/or career ready” when they graduated from high school.  Schools focused on activating the six types of involvement.  They began with Type 2-Communicating to create welcoming schools, strengthen 2-way communications with all families, and increase staff and teacher responsiveness.  District leaders also helped schools work on Type 4-Learning at Home activities focused on how parents and the community could help meet students´ social and emotional needs.  They addressed Type 6-Collaborating with the Community by increasing parents´ access to helpful community resources.  The initiative gave parents an active voice in planning the future of the district.

ATP Tailored for Three

In the fifth year of implementing the NNPS approach for partnership program development, the last group of Alvord´s schools—three comprehensive high schools—created ATPs and attended a team-training workshop.  In this way, all 21 schools in the district had ATPs.  Working with high schools is different from working with schools serving younger children. Alvord’s leaders for partnerships knew that good connections with parents would help improve student achievement and other accomplishments in high school, but they were not sure about how to help all parents support their teen´s education. The district collaborated with the Riverside County Office of Education and 23rd District PTA on a series of workshops for parents—called Parent Engagement Leadership Initiative (PELI).

PELI and the schools´ ATPs focused on meeting the needs of parents of high school students, but topics were comprehensive and aligned with on-going work on partnership program development in elementary and middle schools in Alvord.  There were three parts to the Alvord PELI/ATP sessions. The high school ATPs completed the Starting Points Inventory to identify their present practices of family engagement.  They explored the framework of six types of involvement and the other major components of the NNPS model. Finally, at their own school sites, the teams developed their goal-linked One-Year Action Plans for Partnerships and began to implement some useful, age-appropriate practices of family and community engagement.