Andreas Wiegand, Amy Ng, and Leila Hayashida (NNPS Key Contact).
State-Level Leadership for Partnerships
Hawaii’s leaders for family and community involvement have been strengthening their leadership and facilitation of schools. The state is, in fact, 1 unified school district with 7 regions and 15 complex areas. Among many activities, the department improved its website, extended its inter-departmental connections with colleagues, and produced the Hawaii Parent Guide: A Family Resource. The information for parents included: emergency phone numbers, a school calendar, information on relevant agencies, and articles on first-aid and parenting tips. It also explained the six types of parent/family involvement and gave examples of each. The Guide recognized outstanding parent volunteers and encouraged parental involvement.
The leader for partnerships explained that parents often depend on school personnel to answer all of their questions about their children and schools. But, the school personnel do not always have the answers. Now, information is provided for all families in the Guide. The department published 185,000 copies with help from The Honolulu Advertiser and about a dozen other sponsors. This marked the first time the Department of Education and the Department of Health published a joint publication. “Thank you for the information in the Parent Guide. It matters!” commented a teacher. “I agree that parents are their children’s first and life-long teachers! We only live with their keiki (children) for 9 months.”
Encourage Districts and Schools to Improve their Partnership Programs
Hawaii’s state and regional leaders for partnerships are helping schools in the complex areas to improve their programs of partnerships and to make all Parent Community Networking Centers’ (PCNC) teams (the state’s Action Teams for Partnerships) more effective. State leaders provided district leaders with ideas for newsletters, training on the six types of involvement, and staff development for using a new Data Collection system in a state-wide data base to document progress on partnerships.
In the past, parent involvement data were collected, summarized, and stored on paper in binders. Now, with the new web-based system, PCNC facilitators keep electronic records of parent involvement activities and participation. This makes their work easier, faster, and more useful. The data collection system cost about $50,000 and required time to develop the measures that would be collected and reported. It also took time to teach facilitators to use the new technology. Now, with this investment, data are collected on involvement activities, types of parent involvement, purposes, people involved, costs, evaluation results, and connections with schools’ academic and behavioral goals. Schools will be able to generate reports to increase school improvement, evaluate partnership progress, and identify topics for staff development. District leaders will be able to see, across schools, the activities conducted, which students’ families participated, and how schools are addressing requirements for family involvement in No Child Left Behind.
See Hawaii’s activities in the NNPS collection, Promising Partnership Practices 2007. Visit Hawaii’s Family Support Program and its work on school, family, and community partnerships at http://familysupport.k12.hi.us/