Week 9: Engaging Our Families

Happy Friday!

Thank you for everything you have done this week to educate, discipline, deliver, and organize our students! We are already through the first quarter of the 22-23 school year and seem to be going in a very positive direction. I especially want to mention the staff attendance this week. It was very good. In fact, yesterday there was only one classroom teacher out with a sub for grades K through 5, and most of our secondary teachers out were for school business, which means they were still educating. By stringing together weeks of high attendance like this week, we will definitely see the academic growth of our students.

This week’s Wrap-up contains an update on the legislative plans I shared with you last week and some other updates, but they are all centered around our need to engage ALL families in our district.

District Goals

Our Board adopted the goals that were shared with you all in an earlier Wrap-up, so those things will be our focus for progress monitoring this year. I am sure you noticed certain other aspects of education that are not in the goals, such as a math goal, but our students’ attendance, behavior, and ability to read will enhance all other aspects of their education and our ability to deliver it. By the next Wrap-up, I hope to have a collection of databases to refer to for each one of the goals. They will be updated appropriately.

Engaging All

I know there have been great efforts here to engage families in their children’s education and I want to reinforce the effort because it is so valuable to us. The subtitle of this Wrap-up is actually a quote from Heejae Lim, a Korean immigrant who has created a technology tool to expand the communication between schools and families. It is not necessarily her product that interests me, but her experience that led to the product creation and our effort to involve families in education. The more we are able to have families as a partner in their child’s education, the better we will be able to do our jobs.

This week in our District Leadership PLC we discussed a section of Leaders Eat Last that referred to our tendencies to turn people into abstractions in our minds, especially parents and the community. Abstraction is the lack of personal connection that causes us to look at others as a statistic or a thing, not a person. This especially happens with large numbers of people. How many times do we reference “parents” as a singular group when each of them has their own personal connection to the school? We must foster that personal connection and make sure it is a good one by giving them facts about their child’s development and supporting them with ways to help their child succeed at home. Making each family and our community confident in us will help us in our effort to improve and get the support we need from them and our leadership in Little Rock.

Here are some ways to manage abstractions that the author of our reading provided:

* Keep It Real—Bring People Together. The Internet can’t give us deep and trusting relationships. Trust is formed in person.

* Keep It Manageable: 150 max. Keep your groups at no more than 150 people to reap the benefit of the group’s cohesion and sense of tribal belonging.

* Meet People You Help. Getting a visual and real-world experience of the impact of your work will reward you and motivate you to do even more.

* Give Time, Not Money. We value the time and effort we receive more than money (read more on Drive by Daniel Pink).

* Be Patient— 7 Days and 7 Years. It takes time to develop a bond of love and trust. No one knows how long it takes but it’s more than 7 days and less than 7 years.

Consider who we may be leaving out. Thank you for all you have done to engage families so far this year and let building and district leadership know how we can support this further. We are working on plans to enhance the District’s connection, which we will share as the year progresses and the plans are developed.

Senate Education Adequacy Plan

If you did reach out to any senators last week, thank you. They came out with their plan on Tuesday. You can look over it here. It is very similar to the House plan but there are some differences such as incentive pay for teacher effectiveness and demand and the equalization of ESA funds. Both of these have their pros and cons and will have to be closely examined during the upcoming session.

Closing

I would like to recognize our Beginning Choir that performed last night. Their montage of music covering the decades from the 50s to today was very entertaining and quite ambitious for beginners. Thanks go to Mrs. Tilley for getting them ready. We look forward to more performances this semester.

Our volleyball team will be in the state tournament in Brookland starting Tuesday. Good luck to Coach Lyle and his team as they represent our school and community on the biggest stage for their sport!

Our Bearcat Football team will travel to Stamps this afternoon to take on the Lafayette County Cougars at 7 pm tonight. If you are not making the long trip, watch it on the live stream from The Bearcat Foundation YouTube page.

Our FFA members finish exhibiting their livestock at the Arkansas State Fair this week. Check out the Mena FFA Facebook page to see their results.

Here is last week’s Easter Egg winner!

At Mena Public Schools our students are prepared, our staff is supported, and our community is confident.