(Vol. 4, No. 1 - Spring 2000)


Middle Grades Liaisons Do "Whatever It Takes"
To Reach Out and Bring In Parents

Work schedules and language barriers make some parents of struggling middle school students reluctant to participate in school life. Add to this the normal decline in parent activity when students move to middle school, and it's easy to see why LBUSD's "parent liaisons" have a formidable task. But it's one they relish.

By Anne C. Lewis

Mirna Turcios cuts her calling cards from a sheet of paper typed with her name and phone numbers. She uses a city bus to get around the neighborhood when a home she is visiting is too far away from her "office," a desk in a room she shares with another support person at Washington Middle School. She is on the phone constantly, but knows it is her personal, face-to-face visits that will have the greatest impression on parents. Officially, she works only part time as a middle school"parent liaison." Unofficially? Don't ask.

Turcios' work may sound low key, but she believes she has one of the most important jobs at this west side school. For more than a year, this soft-spoken, tireless mother, who has two daughters at Washington, has been reaching out to middle grades parents who live in the neighborhoods served by the school.

Turcios is one of four parent support workers assigned to middle schools as part of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation-funded efforts. They travel from school to school with the goal of helping all parents understand the district's standards-based approach to teaching and learning, and give extra time and attention to the parents of students who are struggling to meet the standards.

Turcios, chosen for her bilingual skills, has worked mostly at Washington this year, spreading her message that "Every kid is smart, and it is important for parents to tell them 'you can do it.'" She understands the challenges parents in her community face. Many work hard to support their families during school hours, and because of language problems they are often reluctant to become involved at their children's schools. Add to this the normal decline in parent activity when students move from elementary to middle schools, and it's easy to see that Turcios and her fellow workers have a formidable task.

Even so, the parent liaisons relish their work. They share a common philosophy - that parents are essential partners in helping students turn their academic performance around. "Parents don't have to know everything their children are trying to learn," they agree. "They mostly need to support them."

This is the message Turcios brought to Guillermina Salazar, for example, as she sat at the family's kitchen table in December to talk about why Salazar's daughter Veronica, a student at Washington, was making low grades.

"You're smarter than this," Turcios told the seventh-grader as they looked over her grades and work. Turcios shared information from Washington's teachers about the skills they expected Veronica to learn, translating the information from English to Spanish. She offered advice about ways to set up a regular place and time for daily homework and showed Señora Salazar how to check her daughter's school planner regularly.

After several visits to the Salazar home, Turcios began talking about Washington's computer classes for adults, Aztecan dances, and drama productions - all in an effort to lure Mom into becoming involved in the life of the school. It worked. Señora Salazar is now a member of the school site council and is in and out of the building regularly. "I'm comfortable about going to the school," she says, "and I am so happy when I see my daughter there."

And Veronica - who is now making all As and Bs and actually enjoys math - is proof that Turcios' philosophy can bear fruit. "Mother and Mirna both told me I could do it," she says. "And I did."


The "whatever it takes" approach to parent support

Although the parent liaisons were hired expressly to explain the academic standards program to parents and help them find ways to support their children's learning, they have all found that - to be effective - they need to combine personal attention with the education counseling.

Stressed-out single parents listen when parent liaison Sadie Perry, a mother of 10 who moved to Long Beach from Chicago several years ago, shares her life story and talks about the impact on her own children of her increased involvement in their education. It's not unusual for Perry to pick up parents for meetings, visit them at dinnertime, or drop by on Saturday mornings to talk about their children's progress.

Perry's demonstrated success in generating more parent involvement grows out of her willingness to do "whatever it takes" to show them that she and the school system care about their kids. She even volunteered to sing "Amazing Grace" at the funeral of a Hamilton Middle School student's mother, killed by a boyfriend.

"Sadie is getting kids back on track," says Elizabeth Flynn, principal at Robinson Middle School, which Perry also supports. "She can talk Mom to Mom and find positive solutions, where if the advice came from another school official, parents might get defensive." (Flynn is so taken with Perry, in fact, that she's convinced her to become a full-time teacher at Robinson next year.)

Each school uses the parent liaisons according to their needs. Liaison Kathy Scott works with principal Linda Moore to set up meetings with the parents of multiple D and F students at Rogers Middle School. Scott and Moore work together to convince parents to take advantage of after-school programs and other support services available for failing kids, and they help parents and failing students set improvement goals together.

At another middle school, Scott worked on plans to recruit new parents into volunteer activities as soon as they walked in the door. At another school, she helped organize a parent group where none had existed before. She also serves as a parent representative on a district committee that's designing a new standards-based report card that will premiere next year.


Breaking in the principals

The liaisons frequently present information and lead discussions during parent meetings at their schools. "They are developing a full bag of tricks to get the standards messages across," explains Chris Eftychiou, the district's middle grades communications coordinator, who helps supervise the parent support staff.

The liaisons take advantage of videos and other materials prepared by a national communications company expressly to explain LBUSD's standards program. "They've also developed talking points, glossaries, handouts on the use of student planners, general good-parenting tips," he says. "They pick and choose among them to give the right presentations to the right audiences."

Scott, for example, showed parents how teachers use a rubric to make sure students understand the kind of work expected of them on various standards-based assignments. Liaison Anita Griffin helped parents solve the mysteries of the SAT-9 state testing program and how it fits with the district's own assessment plan. She also voluntarily attended a conference to learn more about GEAR-UP, a program at two of her schools that encourages middle-grades students to prepare for college.

When the parent liaison program kicked off last fall, some principals who had not been well-briefed on the program's purpose were slow to take advantage of the new parent communications resource. Unwilling to be ignored or underutilized, the liaisons began to find ways to make themselves useful. "We started by getting on the principals' agendas and letting them know how we could help," says Scott. Not surprisingly, they made the most headway in schools where principals were already committed to strong parent-community outreach.

By mid-year the four women were in great demand, and all of them work far beyond the original 10 hours per week allotted for the jobs. "Now, I'm treated like a queen," said Perry, who often turned up at her schools early in the morning to greet parents.

Working in tandem with Lucretia Espinoza, a student intervention specialist at the some of the schools where she is a parent liaison, Perry reinforces the same messages as Turcios - get involved with what your children are doing at school, provide quiet time, check the planners.

Each of the liaisons, to varying degrees, acknowledges they often must help students with personal problems before addressing academic ones. It's a role they believe they can fulfill more informally than school counselors. Eventually, however, they reach parents with their "bag of tricks" and get down to standards and school work. When language barriers arise, Scott says, each of the liaisons has identified translators who can help get their messages across.

"Parents don't know all the acronyms or everything that is out there to help them,"says Scott. "It's part of our job to untangle all of that and help them help their kids be more successful in school." Griffin adds that while there are ample opportunities available for parents to be involved, many reject traditional groups such as the PTA. "They want to work with kids directly."

One of the traditional barriers to parent involvement, especially among low-income and limited-English speaking parents, is the school office. Many parents feel unwelcome when they visit their child's school, the liaisons say. Perry presented one of her principals with a parent survey indicating that Hispanic parents felt "no one is listening to us." The principal immediately set up meetings with the parents to search for solutions.

Principals and teachers often say they want more parent involvement, but for the most part, they are not trained to work effectively with parents. It's a skill they develop on the job, if at all. At the same time, parents often want to find ways to help out and be more involved in the life of the school. The parent liaisons, as Turcios says, are there to provide a bridge, ultimately drawing parents into higher expectations for their children.

The problem with this picture, observes student intervention specialist Espinoza, who found that Sadie Perry was spending more than 40 hours a week with her parents and children (much of it uncompensated) is that the "liaisons are only part time." There's just more reaching out to be done than four people hired for 10 hours a week can accomplish.


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