(L to R): Cathy Haarstad, Dan Griffith, Stefanie Two Crow, Laurie Matzke, Dr. Wayne G. Sanstead (Superintendent), Donald Vangsnes, and Betty Bostow.
Strengthen Leadership for Partnerships: North Dakota NNPS Partnership
The North Dakota State Parental Information Resource Center (ND PIRC) took the lead in helping districts and schools in North Dakota use the NNPS model to organize their programs of family and community involvement. This led to the adoption of NNPS’s Six Types of Involvement as one part of the state’s Title I approach to parent involvement. The PIRC continues its leadership by providing training, funding, technical assistance, and guidance on evaluation to the Title I schools that joined the North Dakota and NNPS networks. Presently, 33 schools are NNPS members with PIRC support. Each school was provided team training and received $10,000 to fund its own parental information resource center in the school building, establish an Action Team for Partnerships, a parent organization, and was required to write a plan with activities for family and community involvement. The PIRC makes site visits to these schools throughout the year and assists them in resolving challenges to keep their programs moving forward. To continue to receive PIRC funds, each school must demonstrate its progress by having a meaningful parent organization, by evaluating its activities (e.g., sign-in sheets, exit surveys, parent and teacher surveys, UPDATE surveys, and other means) and by maintaining its own satellite resource center.
Each school’s Action Team for Partnerships gives the PIRC an updated One-Year Action Plan for Partnerships each year and identifies how its budget will be allocated for these activities. The PIRC shares the evaluations that the schools provide with the state’s Title I office. When they make official site visits, the state Title I leaders recognize the growing strengths of parent involvement in North Dakota’s Partnership Schools. In every school, parents are involved in activities with their children, community partners participate and offer support, and the educators connect, collaborate, and communicate in new ways that should benefit student learning. The ND PIRC estimates that over 2100 parents were involved in the schools’ practices in the 08-09 school year.
Encourage Districts and Schools to Improve their Partnership Programs: Facilitate the ATPs
Since the ND PIRC joined NNPS in 2007, it has scaled up the number of schools in its network linked to NNPS from 13 in 07-08, to 33 by the spring of 09. In addition to helping schools to form teams, obtain training, receive funds, write plans, and start implementing family and community involvement activities, the ND PIRC provides on-going guidance, support, and oversight to the schools’ ATPs.
There are unique challenges for the schools. North Dakota is, largely, rural and some school teams must travel 300-450 miles to come to meetings or workshops. To balance this burden, the ND PIRC makes site visits to help all school teams with their work and progress. The schools are small and did not receive enough Title I funds to require a set aside for parental involvement. To solve that challenge, PIRC funds were provided with “structural strings” or requirements for program components and for Title I requirements, as part of every school’s organization, plan, and activities. NNPS assisted ND PIRC, when requested, by providing the team training workshops and follow-up sessions that would help the PIRC, the state, and the schools with their work on partnerships.
Promising Practice Day was held in April 2009 with the first 23 schools in the ND network. Each school provided a poster on one successful practice displayed on a wall to celebrate progress and as the basis for discussing challenges and solutions.
See the North Dakota PIRC’s Promising Partnership Practice on the website, www.partnershipschools.org, in the section Success Stories.Visit ND PIRC at http://www.ndstatepirc.org.