National Network of Partnership Schools
Johns Hopkins university
partnership award
winners – 2004
WEBSITE SUMMARIES
2004 Partnership DISTRICT AWARD
WITH SPECIAL DISTINCTION
Seattle
PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Adie Simmons, Director, Family Partnerships Project; Raj
Manhas, Superintendent
 |
| Sarah Tenney-Espinosa, Lin Carlson, Thelma Payne, Raj Manhas (Superintendent) and Adie Simmons (NNPS Key Contact). |
Seattle Public
Schools’ Family Partnerships (FP) Office is demonstrating that it can “grow”
its partnership program to assist increasing numbers of schools. The leadership on partnerships is located in
the Office for Community Learning, which is directly linked to the superintendent. The FP Office conducts a variety of
professional development activities to help educators, parents, and school
board members learn more about effective programs of family and community
involvement. With a mini-grants program,
the district has assisted 28 schools with their partnership programs over two
years.
Superintendent
Raj Manhas explained: “The Family
Partnership Project was created with the goal of teaching schools how to
connect with our diverse families and the community. . . . Schools now are able to align parent involvement practices
with academic goals, contributing to real systemic change in school buildings.” The district also supports an advisory
group of district staff, parents, city officials, and community representatives,
who meet quarterly to discuss the progress of programs and next steps for
partnerships. Looking ahead, Seattle is
preparing to adopt a comprehensive School-Family Partnership Policy to provide
all schools with a framework of support and accountability.
At the district level, the FP Office works with other departments and community
groups to extend work on family involvement.
For example, partnership leaders worked with Bilingual Education,
Enrollment, Professional Development, and the community-based Immigrant Parent
Advocacy Network of Seattle to study parent involvement activities with 10
cultural groups (Chinese, Vietnamese, Somali, Eritrean, Oromo, Latin American,
Laotian, Cambodian, Ethiopian, and Samoan).
They developed surveys, organized interpreters for focus groups, developed workshops,
seminars, presentations, and website sections on the involvement of bilingual
families, and created a handbook for parents that will be distributed to educators and all bilingual households. District
leaders developed and published educational materials, with many translated into
10 languages for direct mailing to 12,000 bilingual families.
At the school
level, the FP Office provides schools’ Action Teams for Partnerships with basic
training, on-site technical assistance, and ongoing e-mail communications. Monthly meetings for team leaders include
presentations, showcasing best practices, news and ideas from NNPS,
announcements, and other information.
The FP Office helps each school link its plans for family and community
involvement to the goals in its School Transformation Plan. An end-of-year celebration and retreat helps
schools share their best practices.
The district is evaluating
schools’ action plans, quality of activities, and outreach to typically
uninvolved parents. Using various
measuring tools and narrative reports, the FP Office found that in 22 schools, over
260 family involvement activities were conducted for all six types of
involvement in the NNPS framework, and over 18,360 parents attended one-time
events. Over one-third of those
activities were targeted to bilingual families, and translated
materials were provided at 62% of the activities. Nearly 80% of the events were linked to academic goals in the School
Transformation Plans.
When the
district faced budget cuts, principals, teachers, parents, and community
partners mobilized support for the Family Partnership Project. The project is now linked with Title I
and NCLB to sustain support and growth.
Seattle is fast becoming a leading school district in linking family and
community involvement to district and school plans for student achievement and
success.
ABOUT NNPS: What Seattle Public School District Leaders Say
to Other Districts . . .
When a colleague took a new job of
Family Partnerships Advocate for her district, she asked for pointers and
resources. My first recommendation to her
was to visit the NNPS website and attend the next NNPS conference in Baltimore
to acquire knowledge and inspiration, and make sure that her district joined
NNPS. The reason for this high
recommendation was that she needed research-based materials, technical
assistance, networking, and, most importantly, a framework for her work – all
of which are offered by NNPS. The NNPS
framework and approaches have been a success in our district because they can
be applied and adapted to our diverse schools and staff and are easy to use and
understand.
For information and
examples from Seattle, visit the district at www.seattleschools.org/area/fam/index.dxml