Schools Get $4.8 Million to Boost Parent Involvement

A recent survey designed to pinpoint ways schools could communicate better with parents underscored the gap it sought to close: Three-quarters of parents said they believed their children were performing at grade level, but only 28% of the teaching staff agreed.

“There are language barriers, cultural barriers, very often educational barriers . . . and a lot of times the teachers don’t live in those communities,” said Peggy Funkhouser, president of the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, which coordinated the survey. “There’s a reluctance to be upfront when you have so many barriers and such a short time to develop trust.”

Spanning that divide is the goal of a new and unprecedented grant announced Wednesday, in which the Weingart Foundation set aside $4.8 million to increase parent involvement, beginning with programs in schools in the northeast San Fernando Valley, near downtown and in Long Beach.

The foundation commissioned the study of 29 schools in the three areas to understand the need before making a commitment to fill it.

Specific approaches are still being finalized and they will vary from school to school. But among those proposed by parent-staff consortiums are parent book-lending libraries, courses to train parents as classroom volunteers, seminars to teach parents how to prepare their children for college entrance and an electronic communication system that will allow parents 24-hour access to their children’s schools.

The grant is a companion to an $8.2-million teacher training award made by the foundation a year ago.

Called “Parents as Learning Partners,” the new grant is being matched by more than $10 million from the two school systems--the Los Angeles and Long Beach unified school districts--and from two education reform groups, the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN) and the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, which is coordinating the program.

One initial hurdle will be persuading parents of the validity of the research linking parent participation to students’ academic achievement. The survey found that 92% of staff--but just 67% of parents--thought students with involved parents performed better in school.

And although nearly all teachers and other staff members said parents were too busy and not interested in their children’s education, only two-thirds of parents concurred.

Parents also said they struggle to help with homework because they lack academic and English language skills (teachers agreed) and because their children don’t tell them what’s expected. Among the proposed solutions are increasing the numbers of English as a Second Language classes offered on school campuses and creating a homework hotline that would allow parents to check what has been assigned.

Although the grant initially involves three groups of campuses attended by 31,000 students--schools feeding into Francis Polytechnic High in Sun Valley, Lincoln High north of downtown and Long Beach Polytechnic High--administrators have committed to eventually extend the parent program to all campuses in the two systems. The three groups are the “families” of schools already receiving extra support from the Annenberg reform organization.

Underlying the effort is the growing recognition that most education reform has focused on getting parents involved in school governance. Although crucial, that reaches only a small group of parents and does not begin to improve all students’ achievement.

“The more we deal with it, the more we realize that parents need to give their kids a place to do serious work, make sure they’re doing homework, check with the school to get feedback--those are true success stories of parental involvement,” said Mike Roos, president of LEARN.