Recognizing Parent Involvement

Traditionally, in the past, and due in part to the legislation, schools have generally looked towards Parent Advisory Councils (PAC) and School Planning Councils (SPC) to gather feedback, information and suggestions. This is not wrong. Nor have all schools used this method to involve parents. But with the Ministry of Education unveiling a new plan for BC’s Education System, now might be the time to think about what parent engagement can look like and how we move from parent involvement to parent engagement. Over the years we have had many opportunities to talk to educators and PACs about what involvement was like in their school and chances were they would often reply that very few parents attend the PAC meeting and it was extremely difficult to get parents out to those meetings. This seemed to be the way many people automatically measured the involvement in their school. And without further inquiry, one would believe that parent involvement is lacking in that school. But when we probed further into this issue and asked questions such as:

• How many parents come out to assemblies?
• How many parents faithfully read 30 minutes a night with their child?
• How many parents offer to help in the classroom when asked?
•   How many parents get involved in the extracurricular activities taking place in your school?

more often than not, the answers would show that there was a lot more parental involvement in their schools than first realised.  To share one experience:

“I can recall a principal coming up to me at the end of our District Review visit in their district to thank me for opening their eyes. When I first posed the question to them, we were lead to believe that the parent involvement in their school was limited to the 4-5 parents who faithfully attended their monthly PAC meeting (maybe 2-3%). Our team talked about all the different ways parents are involved in the schools and how important it was to move away from measuring parent involvement only by those who attend meetings.  At the end of the day of our visit, the principal met with all the school staff and the PAC parents to talk about our visit. He shared with them the conversation we had around measuring parent involvement and asked staff and parents to think of all the ways parents were involved. By the time they finished this exercise it was more like 98% of the parents were found to be involved in their school.”

That is a HUGE difference and something to be celebrated. Yet our mindset seems to measure involvement only by those parents, who for a variety of reasons are able to attend the monthly PAC meetings and run their programs. 

As we move into a new era of education which is focussed on the personalized learning needs of each child and the role parent engagement will play, we may need to rethink how we view parent participation in our schools. In order to fully engage parents, schools will need to look past the more formal way parents are involved and explore the many different ways parents are involved. Whether it is formal (PAC Meetings) or informal (classroom help, etc) all parental involvement is equally important to the success of our children and schools.

Stay tuned for our next post - Moving from Parent Involvement to Parent Engagement