Parents and Schools Together

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Kelly Wachel. Kelly is public information officer for the Center School District in South Kansas City, Missouri. And Kelly has written a terrific book called Parents and Schools Together, Blueprint for Success with Urban Youth. It's all about that partnership that we have with families and about creating success for students.

[00:41] SPEAKER_02:

presentation Kelly welcome to principal center radio thanks for having me I'm excited to be here and it's a wonderful topic and I'm glad that you're willing to talk with your readers and subscribers and listeners about it absolutely and you are a communications professional who works within a school district is that correct that's correct yes I actually started out doing corporate PR and marketing and communications and by a stroke of great luck and great fortune got to join a school district about nine years ago and have been doing that position of public relations communications director for about nine years now.

[01:18] SPEAKER_01:

Fantastic. And I know that's a position I'm familiar with from my time in Seattle Public Schools, which is a fairly large district. But the center school district is a smaller district, is that right?

[01:28] SPEAKER_02:

That's correct. We have about 2,500 students. We're fairly small, four elementary schools. Middle school, high school, alternative school, early childhood center, fairly small, but there are some real advantages to having some smaller schools with PR and communications professionals to help guide the message when you're working with a smaller population.

[01:48] SPEAKER_01:

So Kelly, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the approach that you take in your school district to reaching out to parents, to partnering with parents, and really forging a relationship with families that, in a lot of school districts, people might tend to say, hey, these families don't care very much about their students, or they just don't have a lot to give. You have not made that assumption in your school district simply because you're working with families who may be lower income. What's been the attitude in your school district towards working with families? And how has that shaped the way that you approach that communication and that relationship?

[02:24] SPEAKER_02:

I think that's a great question. And it kind of was the premise of why I wanted to write the book. When I started about eight or nine years ago, our school district, because we are low income, high poverty, pretty much near an urban core of a large city, our achievement wasn't as good as it could be. We were having some challenges with achievement. and academics. And when you look at a school district, the main goal obviously is academics.

[02:51]

You have to teach kids at a really high level. You have to make sure all kids are learning at a really high level. It's all about academics and learning. So we thought, how do we get our parents to understand that it's not just the school's job? How do we get our schools to understand it's not just the school's job, it's both jobs together? And we've made great gains in those last eight years coming from almost provisionally accredited to accredited with distinction, which is the highest kind of level you can get for academic achievement in our state.

[03:22]

And we were working with kids who needed some extra help because maybe they weren't getting the support at home. And so we had to figure out how do we make sure our parents understand our story? And then furthermore, how do we make sure our public, our community understands our story? Half of our battle was fighting the perception of our kids just can't do it. And so we had to get around to knowing that we could do it. We had to believe.

[03:47]

But at the core of that was making sure academics were being taught at high level. And we had a community and a school district that was a place where kids wanted to be, parents wanted to be, and our community wanted to be. We had to be the schools of choice in our community. So we had to start battling kind of the perception first. And to battle perception, you have to make the reality in your schools what it's meant to be. Perception is reality.

[04:13]

Reality is perception lots of times. And we had to start telling our story of why we were good and why we were a place where kids wanted to be. And when you think about that, you have to think about context. I talk about this a lot during my everyday job dealing with schools and Lots of things in our world have to be taken in a certain context. What's going on in the world around us? What's going on in the community around us?

[04:38]

What's going on in our schools? And when you think about context, you have to then think about how do I tell my story within that context? So we were dealing with an urban school district with kind of some low achievement. And how do we break that barrier of people thinking we were going to have low achievement? Well, you have to start proving yourselves and you have to prove yourself academically. And every year you grow and you grow and you grow.

[05:01]

And as you start to grow and as you start to prove yourself through academics and learning, then you can start telling your story of, well, here's why we're good and here's why we're doing better. And as you build on that, you finally form your story of, you know, this is what we are as a school. This is why it can be done. This is how we can help show others it can be done. And that's where you start building on parents and schools together, bringing parents along, bringing schools along, and making sure that we're all working together for the same goal of academic achievement.

[05:33] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely, and I appreciate the way in the book you put academic achievement very clearly first and foremost, and that's something that you don't wait until students are actually in school to emphasize. Can you talk about how in your district, and as you describe in the book, how you start to work with parents from birth to increase kindergarten readiness?

[05:56] SPEAKER_02:

That's important. We had gotten to the point where we were doing good. We had gotten to this distinction level in our performance areas, and we were thinking, well, what's the next level now? We've gotten to this distinction in performance. We're doing really well. We're growing every year.

[06:13]

Our trends are going the right way. We've kind of arrived, you know, for the most part at the academic level. How do we get even better? That's always a question. Well, how do you continue to get better? And we thought, well, we need to start focusing more on the early years.

[06:26]

And I think lots of schools are thinking about this as they always do. How do we make those early learning years something that our parents can help us with? You know, you think about maybe affluent families. You think about some districts that have all the advantages that they have. And they're sending kids to school ready to learn, ready to read, already reading, writing. How do we help our parents who might come from lower income families, less affluent?

[06:55]

How do we help them understand how important it is to have their kids ready for kindergarten? Because if they're ready for kindergarten, then they're ready for elementary, middle school, high school, college and beyond. And so we had to come up with a way to help teach our parents how to be great parents. And I'm sure that you've maybe heard of Parents as Teachers. It's a program in Missouri that was started in Missouri, actually, that's spread kind of across the country. Lots of states have it.

[07:23]

But Parents as Teachers is a program that basically goes into homes of infants and their parents and starts to help guide them on how to be great parents. And it's not by any means a way of telling parents how to be parents, but it kind of is. It's a way of helping parents understand what milestones kids need to reach at certain ages. And it's really just a way to help emphasize how important it is for early learning. We talk about reading, playing, writing, singing songs, all the things that a parent should give to their child, that experience of being a child, that experience of all the things that they need to know to be ready to read and write. Part of the emphasis to write this book too is I was a very young mom and we were going through all these changes and had had three kids in four years.

[08:23]

And I was thinking at home about how I interact with my own kids and Is my experience near the experience of other parents, other moms, other dads? And how do, if I think I'm doing it right, how do we pass that along to other parents as well? And it was really just kind of a parallel thing that I was thinking about at home and at school. And we were at school talking about how do we give this experience of great parents to other parents? And...

[08:53]

You know, as a school district, we have lots of built-in trust with our community and with our parents. And we thought, well, what better way, you know, what better person or what better people than schools to help give the parents that experience and that learning tool.

[09:10] SPEAKER_01:

Also, we have a similar program in our area that our daughter happens to be eligible for because she was born about five weeks premature. And we've gotten the chance to kind of see that curriculum up close. Sounds a lot like what you use in your area. And really, there are a ton of things that, you know, you think you're well-educated, you think you're on top of it, but you think, wow, okay, I'd never actually thought of developing that particular skill or talking my child through that particular issue. and just doing things that contribute to a child being well-rounded and ready for everything that school is going to demand so that she's ready for life and for success beyond K-12. So Kelly, as I look through the book, one thing I noticed that's incredibly helpful in Chapter 7 is the academic standards that you publish for parents grade by grade.

[10:01]

And these are not technically worded. These are not straight out of the Common Core State Standards, although I assume they are based on them, but you've broken down the reading and math goals for students in each grade level and also identified smart steps for parents. Could you talk about the intent with those smart steps and sharing those academic expectations with parents?

[10:21] SPEAKER_02:

Sure, you got it. I really like your setup for that question. The goal of helping our parents understand what their kids need to learn in each grade and going to middle school, high school, elementary school, is that we make it so it's not so complicated. You know, parents have so much information coming at them from so many different ways. And schools send lots of information to parents and kids. And one of the things we thought was, well, you know, we do a great job of sending home information, but are we doing a good job of sending home the academic information?

[10:52]

You know, here's what you need to know to be ready for the next level. Here's what you need to know to be performing at really high levels. And we thought, well, let's just cap each academic standard and each grade level with a smart step or a smart goal. And these, like you said, are very, very simple. The goal is to be fun and pretty straightforward. You know, are you reading this much?

[11:14]

It's read to your child every night before bed. Have them read to you every night before bed. Um, you know, sing a song with them, depending on your age level, um, read a poem together. It's things that are, you know, that you should be doing. Read 20 minutes a night with your child, have them read 29 minutes a night for you. And it's not just elementary or middle school or high school in high school and the middle school, you're still doing those things.

[11:36]

I hope that, you know, have you read your 20 minutes a day and, and, you know those ap classes in high school you're going to read a lot more than that but the goal is that we help parents understand that it's the little things sometimes that really mean a lot with your kids in relationship to school and um we're just asking you to read we're asking you to practice some math facts and do it in a way that's not maybe you know so complicated or so challenging, but make it fun and easy and make it part of your everyday routine, I think is part of the message too. Make reading part of your everyday routine, make math a little bit of your everyday routine. We want it to be part of their lives.

[12:15] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Kelly, obviously the book is a tremendous resource, but while I have you on the air here, if we can get some free advice from a communications professional, what is it that as administrators we should do to build those bridges with parents, to build that partnership with parents, and to improve our communication as a school, as a school district, in support of students' academic achievement? If you could have your way, what would we all be doing?

[12:42] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I'd be having you think about message all the time. What is the message that you're always telling your parents and your community and your colleagues? You know, every day is a test of your perception. Every day the choices that you make are telling people something about yourself. And so I say think about your message and how you portray that to your public. And in doing so, you have to think about your core values.

[13:09]

And you have to think about as a principal what your core value is, as a central office person what your core value is, as a teacher what your core value is. And when you focus on what you think is the most important, which we hope is learning at high levels and academics and teaching kids really well, then everything you do, your message all kind of streams down from that core value. And in doing that, you have a story to tell. And I think stories are kind of the hot topics right now. But in our lives, we relate to things when we think about them in stories. As a child and when we were all children, we love stories because we remember things that way.

[13:52]

Stories help you remember life events. They help you remember things coming up in the future. And so if we as schools can help portray how great public education is, and if your job as a principal or a central office administrator or a teacher is to help kids learn at high levels, how do you tell that story? And in doing so, you help spread the good news of public education. Public education is something that sometimes you feel like there's a little bit of war on public education sometimes. Well, we have a pretty huge army of students and parents and teachers and principals and central office people.

[14:32]

We have a pretty big army to combat the message that... that we're not good because we are good. And every day schools are producing wonderful stories about achievement that the public needs to hear. So my advice, think about your message and how it relates to your core values and go out there and tell your story.

[14:51] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Kelly, if you could pick out a message that our families need to hear from us, obviously we want to communicate from our values and we want to communicate about what's going on in the district and we want our students to be successful. What do you think is the most important thing for families and students to hear from us as a school district?

[15:10] SPEAKER_02:

That it can be done. I think the message is that it can be done. And if you're from a low-income community, if you're from an affluent community, if you're from somewhere right in the middle of that, it's important for schools to always be telling their kids and their parents that, hey, believe. We're doing it. We're going to do it. It can be done.

[15:28]

And here are really high expectations for you because we should expect nothing but high expectations from all of our kids. And it's no different. No matter if you live in the country, in the city, in suburbia, it's all the same. We have to have high expectations for our kids. And no matter where you are, it can be done.

[15:46] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Kelly, thank you so much for joining us for Principal Center Radio. And again, the book is Parents and Schools Together, Blueprint for Success with Urban Youth by Kelly Wachel.

[15:56] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, appreciate the time.

[15:58] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[16:02] SPEAKER_01:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Kelly? One thing that I took away is the idea that we need to be really clear with our families on what we expect from them and what they can do to contribute to their student success as we define it in our school district. And of course, the more we're in conversation about that definition of success, the more that's going to be a shared goal. But I think too often we have these frustrations with parents that keep us from seeing them as our partners. We think, well, parents should be doing XYZ to prepare their students, or if only our parents were different, or if only they raised their children differently, then we could have a better partnership. And what Kelly's district has done is to really prove that a different approach is possible.

[16:47]

They've proven that when you communicate with parents, when you proactively reach out and say, This is what your child needs in order to be successful in kindergarten, in first grade, in fifth grade, in ninth grade. When you share those specific expectations and really treat parents as partners, a funny thing happens. They become your coworkers in creating success for their students. So I want to challenge you to think about what you expect from your parents and don't just assume that they're going to provide it and don't just get frustrated that they're not providing it for their students. Get specific with yourself and then start communicating that in your newsletters, in your orientations, your open house, your parent-teacher conferences. Communicate those expectations to set your parents up for success.

[17:33]

Because as a parent, I can tell you, trying to guess someone else's expectations for you as a parent to prepare your child for what needs to happen in school. That's not a fun guessing game. You want clear communication. You want specifics so that you can follow through and so that you can support your child. And every parent wants that.

[17:54] Announcer:

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