District 99 Forum: Question 5

Allyn Barnett
We always encourage all of our constituent groups to be involved in the process.  We recently went through a process of focus groups to bring all the interests of the community and their ideas into focus for us on the board and the administration to understand what their interests were. It simply isn’t true that just because you have disagreement on an issue that you don’t have communication on an issue. I think it’s important to remember that fact. Certainly the board, the administration listens and communicates with all of their constituent groups, but they don’t always agree with every constituent group. 

Cliff Grammich
I would agree with Mr. Barnett that a board can and should be able to disagree, but I would add that it should be able to do so without being disagreeable. As far as parental involvement is concerned, nothing is more critical to improving student performance. The district has done a good job at this—teachers in particular—through some of the web-based programs and being able to have parents look up their student assignments. I don't think there’s anything that’s more critical to helping my son do well than to look up his assignments each night and to see how his grades are going. Constant communication like that, which has been enabled by the district web page can help a great deal.

Nancy Kupka
Parental involvement is key to the success of any student, but we have different parents with different levels of experience. What I would like to see us do is offer some sort of classes for parents, where we could actually educate the parents on how to help their children. Not all parents have web skills, not all parents know how to help a child develop their own study habits, no all parents know how to look for literature, etc. And I think it would be good and helpful if we could bring together some classes for parents to avail themselves of to help them help their children.

Keith Matune
Obviously parental involvement is key and, as I mentioned earlier ,when you hold your child for the first time, there's that sense that I'm going to do every single thing that I can. The simplest way we can get parental involvement is to simply ask for it. But also in this community, we can use it as an expectation. We’re all busy, we’re working one, two, three jobs sometimes, but we’re always willing to take that extra time out for our kids.

And I think by simply asking, but also making it easily accessible whether it’s web-based, whether it's phone-based or whether it's other forms of communication. Those things, trying to help our parents in understanding the situations they're currently in and making it more accessible would make it ideal. I’m someone who’s been through hundreds of parent-student-teacher conferences and it makes my job easier and makes me a better educator if I have that parental support. And once I do call them, I know that I always have their support. That's something we could always do.

Mike Davenport
I do think a Parent Institute idea  like Ms. Kupka mentioned is a great idea and something I was thinking of myself. But one thing that does occur is that it's one thing to offer these opportunities  to help educate parents, but we need to make sure we're reaching them. It’s really difficult for a single parent. My mom was single several times, and days off of school, coordinating calendars are things we need to take into account how if affects the parents and community, as well as how it affects our children's education.

I’m amazed when I attend my church in town, at the level of talent we have in this town. There I’m looking at musical talent, but we have so many parents, so many community members that possess fantastic backgrounds we could bring and add to our classrooms.