Dr. Linda Fine, Action Team Chair; Howard Jennings, Principal (Stamford School District)
Row 1: Carol Roberts, Elvia Chalmers, and Jim Forde. Row 2: Linda Fine (Chair), Howard Jennings (Principal), Nancy Louth, Lauren Olson, and Wendy Anderson. Not Pictured: Gerri Guzinski and Barbara Meno.
Partnerships tend to be harder to develop at the middle level, but Magnet Middle School has been able to plan and implement an effective partnership program and improve over time. The school’s Action Team wrote a three-year outline and one-year action plan, organized committees, implemented activities, and improved the quality of activities each year. A new principal was integrated as a team member and continues to support the work on partnerships.
Magnet Middle’s Action Team for Partnerships meets monthly and includes parents, teachers, and the administrator. Parents on the team helped identify “missing links” in the school’s communications with parents, and created a homeroom-parents network. The team also developed effective two-way communications in the school newsletter, and provided transportation and baby-sitting services for parents attend school meetings. Interactive homework and Saturday learning workshops for students, teachers, and parents were added to focus on student learning. The school’s evaluation suggested that the partnership program increased the percent of students who say they talk with their parents about school and homework each day.
The school serves students and families from all parts of the city, and will be moving to a new building with a new name this fall. This poses new challenges for family and community involvement that the Action Team plans to address. The Action Team is creating an orientation program for next year’s incoming sixth graders by working with students and families when they are still fifth graders. Their approach will include panels of parents, teachers, and students, and administrators to talk with the upcoming students and families.
Magnet Middle School’s Action Team Chairperson explained that the National Network helped the school view parent and community involvement with a “wide-angle lens.” She added: “We believe that becoming a member of an organization devoted to family involvement in education is essential. (The National Network of Partnership Schools) leads to connections with other leaders to share ideas about family support. . . . The three-year outline and one-year plan are wonderful tools to use from the National Network of Partnership Schools . . .(to) help the school go from the start to where it wants to be in three years . . . in positive and proactive ways.
--Dr. Linda Fine and Howard Jennings, Magnet Middle School