School Site Visits Help Improve Program Development in Los Angeles

To continually strengthen all schools’ partnership programs, district facilitators in Los Angeles Unified School District, Local District F, conducted school site visits during the school year. The visits included interviews with focus groups of teachers, parents, students, members of the Action Team for Partnerships, Action Team chairs, the principal, support staff, and parent center staff. The district leaders reported findings to each school’s Action Team for Partnerships, and followed up the discussion with a written report on the strengths and needs of each school’s program.

The site visits helped the district leadership team identify each school’s progress and needs for the upcoming year. The core findings of the site visits included:

Action Teams for Partnerships need more training. Each school will bring two teachers, two parents, an administrator, and a community representative to Action Team training sessions.
Action Team training should focus on helping each school develop an action plan for partnerships. The actions plan should include space for the levels and sources of funds for each activity.
More teacher training on partnerships should be offered. All teachers in a school need information and guidelines on home-school communication, home visits, student-led conferences, interactive homework, parent involvement at the secondary level, and organizing parent workshops, and other strategies.
Partnership training should include special topics for school and district administrators and Title I and bilingual coordinators.

The time spent at each school site yielded important information to guide district leaders in how to help schools strengthen their programs of school, family, and community partnerships.

Adapted from: Promising Partnership Practices—2001, National Network of Partnership Schools at Johns Hopkins University.