William H. Gruber, II, Action Team Chair; Jeff Broyles, Liaison to Building Leadership Team; Denny Dyer, Principal (Tecumseh School District)
Row 1: Denny Dyer (Principal), Micki Norfleet, Kari Dillman, Deanna Gehret, Angela Furlong, Mike Mastin, Jennifer Fell, Marianne Rinaldi, and Bill Gruber (ATP Chair). Row 2-4: Westlake Staff.
Westlake Elementary School in New Carlisle, Ohio, is a Title I, targeted-assisted school. The Action Team for Partnerships of parents, teachers, and the administrator has a chairperson, a facilitator, timekeeper, recorder, and liaison to the Building Leadership Team. The team organizes committees for each of the six types of involvement, so that many people have important roles to play. The leader claims “low turnover” of team members, perhaps because tasks are delegated and shared. The Action Team and the PTO work together on activities to build school spirit, support student achievement, and advance other school improvement goals. Westlake Elementary was a recipient of a Partnership School Award for the 1999-2000 school year, showing that the school is aware of the need to continually improve and sustain a productive partnership program.
During the 2000-2001 school year, several activities for each of the six types of involvement were conducted including a health fair and parent room (Type 1-Parenting); weekly newsletters, monthly parent-gram, weekly education calls from the principal, Westlake video (Type 2-Communicating); Ohio Reads Volunteers, Tecumseh ROTC Ohio Reads, Parent Resource Directory (Type 3-Volunteers); weekly homework packets, literacy activity night, proficiency night (Type 4-Learning at Home); Building Leadership Team, Action Team, PTO leadership activities (Type 5-Decision Making); and Target store, Subway bulletin boards, and Scarff’s Nursery (Type 6- Collaborating with the Community), among others for the six types.
This year the school won a grant to develop the “Forging Responsible Youth ‘Club Hero’ Project,” for which parents, staff, and community members work with students on building good citizenship and character. Westlake also continues to evaluate all partnership activities and program progress.
Since joining the Network, (Westlake) has created a vision for the school … (of) parents and staff working together to (support) student achievement. The National Network of Partnership Schools (offers) many benefits . . . and great support.
--Westlake Elementary School leaders at NNPS Leadership Development Workshop, Spring 2000