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| Row 1: Sue Archbold (NNPS Key Contact), Beth Kuehn, and Pam Naegele. Row 2: Linda Rodgers, Dr. Roger Giroux (Superintendent), Natalie Laski, and Tammy Schmitz. |
The leadership of Anoka-Hennepin has made family and community involvement a district priority. The Parent Involvement Coordinator is tightly linked to the Director of Community Education, Assistant Superintendent, and Superintendent - making parent involvement an important part of the district's steering groups: the Superintendent's Expanded Cabinet, the Early Childhood Cabinet, the Talent Development Steering Committee, the Family Partnership District Committee, and the Community Education Leadership Team. The Parent Involvement Coordinator and the Volunteer Services Supervisor work, as the Parent Involvement Team, to guide schools so that their family and community involvement programs support the superintendent's vision and goals. Each year, the two leaders meet with all new principals in the district to discuss family involvement.
The Parent Involvement Team aligns its objectives with the goals the district sets for students' academic achievement, such as reading and math, and for development and behavior, such as anti-bullying and talent development. The team also aligns partnerships with state and federal objectives.
The parent involvement leaders meet daily to assure continued success in Partnership Schools, troubleshoot areas of concern, and generate new ideas for growth of the program. Monthly staff meetings are conducted, along with bi-annual meetings with principals, parents, and volunteers to address challenges and to celebrate successes. The Parent Involvement Team sends e-mail updates to schools' Partnership Teams (Anoka's Action Teams for Partnerships) and distributes relevant resources from NNPS and from other sources to Partnership Teams and to district administrators.
One successful practice, Kindergarten Data Collection by Volunteers Project, trained volunteers to record the reading levels of 2,800 kindergarteners in the district. This activity provided important data on the reading abilities of kindergarten students (including phonemic awareness, letter identification, and knowledge of how words are printed), and saved valuable class time of teachers. The project was guided by the district's Volunteer Services, aided by a graduate student from the University of Minnesota who provided objective analysis and quality control to the project, guided by the Parent Involvement Coordinator. In another reading-related practice, Volunteer Services is training volunteers to facilitate Literature Circles (book clubs) in order to increase students' critical thinking skills as part of schools' Talent Development programs.
The Parent Involvement Team worked with schools, families and the community to support student success in other ways. For example, district leaders and the Anoka County Courts sponsored Parents Forever, a research-based, state-approved curriculum for parents who are divorcing to help them successfully co-parent their children. The program lessens the trauma of divorce for children and helps them stay focused in school. The district leaders also assisted Parent Teacher Organizations to design pages for their schools' web sites and to use e-mail to facilitate communications.
Anoka-Hennepin evaluates all activities to ensure the continued success of its partnership program. This year, they assessed all parent classes, collected program-wide participation statistics, and conducted a random sample phone survey of parents and some community members about partnership opportunities.
Visit Anoka-Hennepin at http://www.anoka.k12.mn.us/ParentInvolvement.