Row 1: Jill Camber Davidson, Patricia Bober, Neldine Nichols, Ruth Anne Landsverk,
Barb Ebben, Jill Haglund, and Steve Kretzmann.
Row 2: CLP Director Jane Grinde,
Elizabeth Burmaster (State Superintendent),
Betsy Prueter, and Richard Grobschmidt.
State-Level Leadership for Partnerships
Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has a long history with NNPS, building state leadership, policy, and procedures to emphasize the importance of family and community involvement. The state leaders for partnerships – the Community Learning and Partnerships Team (CLP) – work to improve the partnership agenda and providing training and guidance to districts and schools across the state to take charge of their own partnership programs.
In 2008, CLP partnered with Wisconsin’s Responsive Education for All Children (REACh) to conduct free partnership training workshops. The CLP/REACh collaboration reflects the groups’ shared mission of increasing parental involvement in schools. REACh advertised the training sessions on its website and provided the venue for the workshops. CLP provided the content – built on NNPS’s framework of six types of involvement, action team approach, and goal-oriented partnership plans for student success. The Fundamentals of Family Involvement workshops were conducted last year at 12 Cooperative Education Service Agency (CESA) offices across the state. More than 300 school and district level staff attended the sessions and learned how to inventory their present practices of family and community involvement, identify challenges to involving all families, and address those challenges by writing goal-oriented action plans for partnerships.
Encourage Districts and Schools to Improve their Partnership Programs
To help schools’ Action Teams for Partnerships meet their goals, Wisconsin’s DPI supported a project with 20 full-time volunteer staff through the national Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program. VISTA members were stationed at schools in rural and urban districts to assist the schools in strengthening their Action Teams for Partnerships and in developing and implementing effective partnership practices, using DPI and NNPS resources. The main goal is to increase student achievement with the support school, family, and community partnerships.
VISTAs helped their schools complete many projects and products, such as designing effective school-home communication forms, recruiting volunteers, and incorporating parents in school decision-making activities. The projects focused on attendance, student behavior and social skills, helping families support student learning, and creating a welcoming climate in all schools. They also served as DPI site contacts, submitting quarterly progress reports, action plans, and NNPS UPDATE forms. The VISTA project enables DPI to develop close relationships with school staff, community partners, and families in many parts of the state, and learn what technical support schools and districts need to improve and sustain their partnership programs.
See the history of Wisconsin DPI’s Partnership State Awards on the website, www.partnershipschools.org in the section Success Stories. Visit the state at http://dpi.wi.gov and click on Divisions and Teams, and the Division for Library, Technology, and Community Learning.