	Mar/Apr 2007
When Parents Are Students: Second in a Series of Articles on Parent Involvement By Sarah Auerbach, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer Each year, Featherstone Elementary School holds an unusual graduation ceremony. True, there are speeches, caps, and gowns, and students who parade across the stage to proudly claim their certificates and receive flowers from family members. But there's a role reversal going on here. The beaming graduates receiving the certificates are parents, and the ones cheering are the official students of the elementary school, their kids. The parents, like their kids, are English language learners (ELLs). They're graduating from a special program, called Parents as Educational Partners (PEP), that's intended to help them become more actively involved in their children's educational lives. In the program, they learn all about the teachers and administrators who keep the school running smoothly. They master the English vocabulary necessary to call in an absence or attend a parent-teacher conference. And they learn how to help their kids succeed at school by helping them succeed at homework. Featherstone's upside-down graduation isn't the only role reversal these parents experience during their time in the program. Gina Sosa, who administers and teaches Featherstone's program, gives the parents homework every day. What's more, they have to get their homework signed by their kids. She wants them to experience what it's like to be a student in the school. If they don't get their homework signed by their kids, they'll face the same shame and embarrassment their children do when the situation is reversed. She says this helps parents to understand that even though their kids are young, school is hard for them. "If you forget to sign their homework, it's stressful for them," Sosa says. The parents in Sosa's program are not strangers to stress. Many work two or more jobs at hours that make it difficult for them to participate in school functions. Some don't have cars, which means it's practically impossible to transport themselves to schools for conferences. English is a second language for all—most are native Spanish speakers—and it's common for parents to need their children to translate at doctors' visits and other important appointments, which can be embarrassing for parents and disruptive to their children's educations. Some parents never attended school in their home countries and aren't literate in their home languages. Under these circumstances, writing an excuse-from-school note or finding out how their kids are doing in math is a major challenge. PEP's purpose is to help parents of ELLs meet this challenge. The curriculum, developed in the early nineties by Laurie Bercovitz and Catherine Porter of the Adult Learning Resource Center (http://www.thecenterweb.org/alrc/), includes seven units that lead parents through the workings of U.S. schools and their local school system. It is designed so that it can be taught in any language, but if necessary, it teaches through signs and pictures the English vocabulary necessary to perform tasks that most parents take for granted, such as sending in an excuse note or attending a conference. "When parents feel they know the way the school runs, they feel they have more power," says Sosa. Turning parents into active participants in their children's education was Carol Bass's primary goal when she brought PEP to Prince William County, Virginia in 2001. Bass is the English as a Second Language (ESOL) and foreign language supervisor for Prince William County, which is home to Featherstone and 69 other schools that currently have PEP programs. But in the 1999 school year, Bass had not yet heard of PEP. She only knew she had a problem. An evaluation of her program had discovered that teachers at elementary, middle, and high school levels felt that parents needed to be more involved. What's more, 82 percent of parents said they weren't getting enough school information in a format—or language—they could understand. So Bass put together a committee and began talking about how to fill the gap. Bass and her committee had already begun their work when the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law made their project even more relevant. The then-new law states that school districts must help parents of English learners get involved in their children's education. It also makes grant money available for this purpose. Bass eyed that money with great interest. It seemed ready-made for her committee's project. While the committee was ramping up its efforts, Bass sent a group of teachers to the 2002 National Association of Bilingual Education (NABE) conference, where they heard about how well PEP was working for its pilot schools in Illinois and in other districts nationwide. Bass realized that PEP was the solution her committee members had been searching for. She got in touch with PEP's creators, and in June 2002, Bercovitz and Porter spent two days training 30 Prince William County volunteer teachers from 23 schools in how to teach PEP. That fall, Bass launched the PEP pilot at five schools. The volunteer teachers had two days of training under their belts and were armed with only a bin containing the PEP curriculum materials and a plastic tub filled with basic supplies. By the next year, Bass had launched PEP into 40 of the district's schools and was able to pay teachers out of a NCLB grant intended specifically for that purpose. This year, Bass has 70 schools running PEP. As the program gained momentum, Bass saw that teachers in different schools were customizing it for their own needs. What worked at one school didn't necessarily fly at another. For example, a majority of Prince William County schools offer PEP primarily in English (the curriculum doesn't specify what language it should be taught in), but Featherstone's Sosa, whose students are 60-70 percent Spanish-speaking, teaches the first two years of PEP in Spanish. Schools also choose to schedule the 32-hour program differently. At Featherstone, parents attend class for an hour every afternoon Monday through Thursday, but elsewhere, many PEP teachers find that attendance is better in the evenings. Some schools find a benefit in serving food, or offering child care, or combining parent classes with homework help for kids. (Food, child care, and tutoring aren't covered by the NCLB grant, so schools must provide those out of their own budgets.) Some schools pay teachers with grant money for their time, and others depend on volunteers. Sometimes schools must experiment to find out what works best. Monica Findley of Bel Air Elementary is in her third year of working with PEP, and this year she's offering the program in conjunction with Homework Buddies, an after-school tutoring program. The first two years she was involved, PEP was offered in the evening, and more than 20 parents attended. Now parents are required to attend PEP in the afternoon if they want their children to get help through Homework Buddies. But this requirement has had a contrary effect: Not only has PEP attendance dropped because so many parents work afternoons, but Homework Buddies attendance has dropped as well. Findley wants to rethink the timing and coordination of the program to see if she can solve this problem. How teachers run PEP at their individual schools is also dependent on the particular skills and resources they bring to bear. Kelly Cox, McAuliffe Elementary School's computer technology teacher, combines two programs that she administers, PEP and "Dare to Dream." She asks her PEP parents and their kids to work together on projects that imagine the kids' future careers. And Bel Air's Findley uses techniques borrowed from her ESOL background to visually and kinesthetically reinforce concepts: a construction paper backpack that contains a list of the seven techniques parents can use to help students get homework done; or cards, dice, and domino games parents can play with students to drive home math concepts. Despite the relatively minor differences in how the schools administer PEP, there are many PEP techniques that work well districtwide. PEP teachers refer parents to resources outside the schools, such as social workers, adult ESOL programs, or job training. Teachers help parents to understand the library system, which sometimes means starting by explaining that the books really are free to anyone who wants them. And teachers often spend time helping parents understand Web sites that can help them find jobs, learn English, or check up on their children's progress. Many PEP teachers work one-on-one with their adult students to help them find work. Sosa tells the story of one mom who was chronically ill. "We told her that she needed to do something else; we pushed her to start working," Sosa says. Now she's working for the county in a public school cafeteria. "She's very proud," says Sosa. "She still has the illness, but seems like she can take that better now that she's busy." That mom is still taking PEP. "She says, 'Every year, I learn something different,'" says Sosa. Those kinds of anecdotes keep PEP teachers going, but the district's Carol Bass can also point to concrete evidence that PEP works. Last year, she repeated the evaluation that in 1999 told her that 82 percent of parents did not have the information they needed about their children and their schools. This time around, a stunning 96 percent of parents reported that they were satisfied with the schools in that regard. The teachers who run PEP in the district's schools ask parents to fill out an evaluation at the end of every PEP session; 99 percent of participating parents report that they are satisfied with the program. As information began to trickle in to Bass's office about the success of the program, she knew it could work for other districts statewide. She brought PEP to the attention of Roberta Schlicher, the director of Virginia's Office of (federal) Program Administration and Accountability. Schlicher watched while Bercovitz and Porter trained Prince William County teachers in PEP, and she liked what she saw. "I saw a very well-organized and structured training program," she says. So she decided to bring the PEP training to other districts statewide. During the past two summers, the state has trained teachers from more than 30 Virginia districts in the PEP curriculum. And Schlicher is pleased with the results. "People think that it's a wonderful program, a wonderful training," she says. "They like... that they can come, focus, and get trained, and leave with all the information they need to implement it in their school division." Schlicher's office will offer the two-day training again this summer. Despite PEP's successes at elementary schools in Prince William County, it is not, by itself, a cure-all for the problem of getting parents of ELLs involved in the schools. For one thing, at least in the case of Bass's program, teachers can use funding only to promote parent involvement. They can't use the funds to teach adults English as a second language, so they have to limit the amount of work on English language development they do. Also, the flexibility that makes PEP so successful has its limitations. In some settings, such as Potomac High School, where Melissa Dembele teaches PEP, parents won't—or can't—attend 32 hours of class. In Dembele's first year teaching PEP, she graduated seven students, but the next year, only one person finished. "For a lot of parents, [32 contact hours] is hard for them; they work very long hours at one job or they may work two jobs." And, says Dembele, parents at the high school level are not as eager or as available to be directly involved in their students' lives as they are at the elementary level. But the need for involvement at the high school level, is, if anything, more pressing, she says. "Today I had a child come to me [who] when he registered I told him that he absolutely needed to get his transcript from his country. Now that he's needing to register for his classes next year, he's like, 'I've already taken that!' and I'm like, 'I don't have your transcript, honey!'" "I had food, I make phone calls, I've sent letters home," she says. "The thing that's frustrating to me is that I know they're putting a lot of money into [PEP at the high school level], and I just feel that it could be better spent. It could be used to reach more parents." In an effort to combat this problem, McAuliffe Elementary's Cox has built a partnership that helps alleviate the strain of recruiting parents at the high school level. Cox coordinates her PEP program with her local middle and high schools, and divides adult students into three levels: beginning, intermediate, and advanced. This takes care of attendance, because the parents of younger students balance out the high school parents, and because parents for the most part have gotten exposure to the idea of involvement before their kids hit the high school level. Bass and Cox and several other teachers have worked together over the summers to extend the PEP curriculum to make it more relevant at the high school level, including issues such as graduation requirements, applying to colleges, and summer school classes. Dembele herself has found that a very small number of highly-focused meetings can do more to pull in high school parents than an ongoing curriculum. She recently held a single, one-night meeting, which was attended by about a third of the parents of her 94 English learners. She has also discussed with the district's Bass and her staff the idea of creating a tutoring program for English learners and requiring their parents to either pick them up or drop them off, thus creating an opportunity for connection that might not otherwise take place. That single opportunity for connection can be all it takes to break the ice. "A lot of our parents started out very timid; a lot of them have not even completed elementary school," says Cox. Once they've learned to phone in to the attendance line, attend a parent-teacher conference, or write a note to school, she says, "it makes them feel a lot more comfortable. ...It's freeing." She tells the story of a parent who routinely took her daughter out of school to translate for her during doctor's appointments. Not only was it awkward for the mother to have to depend on her daughter in this way, but it regularly interrupted her daughter's schooling. "Then one day, she didn't take in her daughter, and she was able to talk to the doctor and the doctor said, 'I am so proud of you for your English, I'm able to understand what you're saying, what have you been doing?' And she said, 'I've been going to PEP classes at my daughter's school,' and he said, 'Well, continue, please.'" That doctor is not the only one who would like to see PEP continue in Prince William County. Bass gets letters of effusive praise from parents who have finished the program. "They... say that they were always so afraid to walk into a school and that after PEP they not only wanted to walk in but they couldn't wait to go back and they wanted to go back more days," she says. In response to seeing their parents make first-time appearances at everything from class parties to field trips, Featherstone's proud students are perhaps the program's biggest fans. Says Sosa, "The kids are telling them every day, 'Mom, I'm so proud of you because I'm learning, you're helping me now, you're coming to my school more often.'" And as those Featherstone graduation flowers attest, these kids know firsthand how much a show of family support means to the success of an education. If you have any comments about this article or questions for for the author, please send them to: alex@coursecrafters.com.
Copyright © 2007 Course Crafters, Inc.® All rights reserved.

Mar/Apr 2007

When Parents Are Students: Second in a Series of Articles on Parent Involvement

By Sarah Auerbach, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer

Each year, Featherstone Elementary School holds an unusual graduation ceremony. True, there are speeches, caps, and gowns, and students who parade across the stage to proudly claim their certificates and receive flowers from family members. But there's a role reversal going on here. The beaming graduates receiving the certificates are parents, and the ones cheering are the official students of the elementary school, their kids.

The parents, like their kids, are English language learners (ELLs). They're graduating from a special program, called Parents as Educational Partners (PEP), that's intended to help them become more actively involved in their children's educational lives. In the program, they learn all about the teachers and administrators who keep the school running smoothly. They master the English vocabulary necessary to call in an absence or attend a parent-teacher conference. And they learn how to help their kids succeed at school by helping them succeed at homework.

Featherstone's upside-down graduation isn't the only role reversal these parents experience during their time in the program. Gina Sosa, who administers and teaches Featherstone's program, gives the parents homework every day. What's more, they have to get their homework signed by their kids. She wants them to experience what it's like to be a student in the school. If they don't get their homework signed by their kids, they'll face the same shame and embarrassment their children do when the situation is reversed. She says this helps parents to understand that even though their kids are young, school is hard for them. "If you forget to sign their homework, it's stressful for them," Sosa says.

The parents in Sosa's program are not strangers to stress. Many work two or more jobs at hours that make it difficult for them to participate in school functions. Some don't have cars, which means it's practically impossible to transport themselves to schools for conferences. English is a second language for all—most are native Spanish speakers—and it's common for parents to need their children to translate at doctors' visits and other important appointments, which can be embarrassing for parents and disruptive to their children's educations. Some parents never attended school in their home countries and aren't literate in their home languages. Under these circumstances, writing an excuse-from-school note or finding out how their kids are doing in math is a major challenge.

PEP's purpose is to help parents of ELLs meet this challenge. The curriculum, developed in the early nineties by Laurie Bercovitz and Catherine Porter of the Adult Learning Resource Center (http://www.thecenterweb.org/alrc/), includes seven units that lead parents through the workings of U.S. schools and their local school system. It is designed so that it can be taught in any language, but if necessary, it teaches through signs and pictures the English vocabulary necessary to perform tasks that most parents take for granted, such as sending in an excuse note or attending a conference. "When parents feel they know the way the school runs, they feel they have more power," says Sosa.

Turning parents into active participants in their children's education was Carol Bass's primary goal when she brought PEP to Prince William County, Virginia in 2001. Bass is the English as a Second Language (ESOL) and foreign language supervisor for Prince William County, which is home to Featherstone and 69 other schools that currently have PEP programs. But in the 1999 school year, Bass had not yet heard of PEP. She only knew she had a problem. An evaluation of her program had discovered that teachers at elementary, middle, and high school levels felt that parents needed to be more involved. What's more, 82 percent of parents said they weren't getting enough school information in a format—or language—they could understand. So Bass put together a committee and began talking about how to fill the gap. Bass and her committee had already begun their work when the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law made their project even more relevant. The then-new law states that school districts must help parents of English learners get involved in their children's education. It also makes grant money available for this purpose. Bass eyed that money with great interest. It seemed ready-made for her committee's project.

While the committee was ramping up its efforts, Bass sent a group of teachers to the 2002 National Association of Bilingual Education (NABE) conference, where they heard about how well PEP was working for its pilot schools in Illinois and in other districts nationwide. Bass realized that PEP was the solution her committee members had been searching for. She got in touch with PEP's creators, and in June 2002, Bercovitz and Porter spent two days training 30 Prince William County volunteer teachers from 23 schools in how to teach PEP.

That fall, Bass launched the PEP pilot at five schools. The volunteer teachers had two days of training under their belts and were armed with only a bin containing the PEP curriculum materials and a plastic tub filled with basic supplies. By the next year, Bass had launched PEP into 40 of the district's schools and was able to pay teachers out of a NCLB grant intended specifically for that purpose. This year, Bass has 70 schools running PEP.

As the program gained momentum, Bass saw that teachers in different schools were customizing it for their own needs. What worked at one school didn't necessarily fly at another. For example, a majority of Prince William County schools offer PEP primarily in English (the curriculum doesn't specify what language it should be taught in), but Featherstone's Sosa, whose students are 60-70 percent Spanish-speaking, teaches the first two years of PEP in Spanish. Schools also choose to schedule the 32-hour program differently. At Featherstone, parents attend class for an hour every afternoon Monday through Thursday, but elsewhere, many PEP teachers find that attendance is better in the evenings. Some schools find a benefit in serving food, or offering child care, or combining parent classes with homework help for kids. (Food, child care, and tutoring aren't covered by the NCLB grant, so schools must provide those out of their own budgets.) Some schools pay teachers with grant money for their time, and others depend on volunteers.

Sometimes schools must experiment to find out what works best. Monica Findley of Bel Air Elementary is in her third year of working with PEP, and this year she's offering the program in conjunction with Homework Buddies, an after-school tutoring program. The first two years she was involved, PEP was offered in the evening, and more than 20 parents attended. Now parents are required to attend PEP in the afternoon if they want their children to get help through Homework Buddies. But this requirement has had a contrary effect: Not only has PEP attendance dropped because so many parents work afternoons, but Homework Buddies attendance has dropped as well. Findley wants to rethink the timing and coordination of the program to see if she can solve this problem.

How teachers run PEP at their individual schools is also dependent on the particular skills and resources they bring to bear. Kelly Cox, McAuliffe Elementary School's computer technology teacher, combines two programs that she administers, PEP and "Dare to Dream." She asks her PEP parents and their kids to work together on projects that imagine the kids' future careers. And Bel Air's Findley uses techniques borrowed from her ESOL background to visually and kinesthetically reinforce concepts: a construction paper backpack that contains a list of the seven techniques parents can use to help students get homework done; or cards, dice, and domino games parents can play with students to drive home math concepts.

Despite the relatively minor differences in how the schools administer PEP, there are many PEP techniques that work well districtwide. PEP teachers refer parents to resources outside the schools, such as social workers, adult ESOL programs, or job training. Teachers help parents to understand the library system, which sometimes means starting by explaining that the books really are free to anyone who wants them. And teachers often spend time helping parents understand Web sites that can help them find jobs, learn English, or check up on their children's progress.

Many PEP teachers work one-on-one with their adult students to help them find work. Sosa tells the story of one mom who was chronically ill. "We told her that she needed to do something else; we pushed her to start working," Sosa says. Now she's working for the county in a public school cafeteria. "She's very proud," says Sosa. "She still has the illness, but seems like she can take that better now that she's busy." That mom is still taking PEP. "She says, 'Every year, I learn something different,'" says Sosa.

Those kinds of anecdotes keep PEP teachers going, but the district's Carol Bass can also point to concrete evidence that PEP works. Last year, she repeated the evaluation that in 1999 told her that 82 percent of parents did not have the information they needed about their children and their schools. This time around, a stunning 96 percent of parents reported that they were satisfied with the schools in that regard. The teachers who run PEP in the district's schools ask parents to fill out an evaluation at the end of every PEP session; 99 percent of participating parents report that they are satisfied with the program.

As information began to trickle in to Bass's office about the success of the program, she knew it could work for other districts statewide. She brought PEP to the attention of Roberta Schlicher, the director of Virginia's Office of (federal) Program Administration and Accountability. Schlicher watched while Bercovitz and Porter trained Prince William County teachers in PEP, and she liked what she saw. "I saw a very well-organized and structured training program," she says. So she decided to bring the PEP training to other districts statewide. During the past two summers, the state has trained teachers from more than 30 Virginia districts in the PEP curriculum. And Schlicher is pleased with the results. "People think that it's a wonderful program, a wonderful training," she says. "They like... that they can come, focus, and get trained, and leave with all the information they need to implement it in their school division." Schlicher's office will offer the two-day training again this summer.

Despite PEP's successes at elementary schools in Prince William County, it is not, by itself, a cure-all for the problem of getting parents of ELLs involved in the schools. For one thing, at least in the case of Bass's program, teachers can use funding only to promote parent involvement. They can't use the funds to teach adults English as a second language, so they have to limit the amount of work on English language development they do. Also, the flexibility that makes PEP so successful has its limitations. In some settings, such as Potomac High School, where Melissa Dembele teaches PEP, parents won't—or can't—attend 32 hours of class. In Dembele's first year teaching PEP, she graduated seven students, but the next year, only one person finished. "For a lot of parents, [32 contact hours] is hard for them; they work very long hours at one job or they may work two jobs." And, says Dembele, parents at the high school level are not as eager or as available to be directly involved in their students' lives as they are at the elementary level.

But the need for involvement at the high school level, is, if anything, more pressing, she says. "Today I had a child come to me [who] when he registered I told him that he absolutely needed to get his transcript from his country. Now that he's needing to register for his classes next year, he's like, 'I've already taken that!' and I'm like, 'I don't have your transcript, honey!'"

"I had food, I make phone calls, I've sent letters home," she says. "The thing that's frustrating to me is that I know they're putting a lot of money into [PEP at the high school level], and I just feel that it could be better spent. It could be used to reach more parents."

In an effort to combat this problem, McAuliffe Elementary's Cox has built a partnership that helps alleviate the strain of recruiting parents at the high school level. Cox coordinates her PEP program with her local middle and high schools, and divides adult students into three levels: beginning, intermediate, and advanced. This takes care of attendance, because the parents of younger students balance out the high school parents, and because parents for the most part have gotten exposure to the idea of involvement before their kids hit the high school level. Bass and Cox and several other teachers have worked together over the summers to extend the PEP curriculum to make it more relevant at the high school level, including issues such as graduation requirements, applying to colleges, and summer school classes.

Dembele herself has found that a very small number of highly-focused meetings can do more to pull in high school parents than an ongoing curriculum. She recently held a single, one-night meeting, which was attended by about a third of the parents of her 94 English learners. She has also discussed with the district's Bass and her staff the idea of creating a tutoring program for English learners and requiring their parents to either pick them up or drop them off, thus creating an opportunity for connection that might not otherwise take place.

That single opportunity for connection can be all it takes to break the ice. "A lot of our parents started out very timid; a lot of them have not even completed elementary school," says Cox. Once they've learned to phone in to the attendance line, attend a parent-teacher conference, or write a note to school, she says, "it makes them feel a lot more comfortable. ...It's freeing."

She tells the story of a parent who routinely took her daughter out of school to translate for her during doctor's appointments. Not only was it awkward for the mother to have to depend on her daughter in this way, but it regularly interrupted her daughter's schooling. "Then one day, she didn't take in her daughter, and she was able to talk to the doctor and the doctor said, 'I am so proud of you for your English, I'm able to understand what you're saying, what have you been doing?' And she said, 'I've been going to PEP classes at my daughter's school,' and he said, 'Well, continue, please.'"

That doctor is not the only one who would like to see PEP continue in Prince William County. Bass gets letters of effusive praise from parents who have finished the program. "They... say that they were always so afraid to walk into a school and that after PEP they not only wanted to walk in but they couldn't wait to go back and they wanted to go back more days," she says. In response to seeing their parents make first-time appearances at everything from class parties to field trips, Featherstone's proud students are perhaps the program's biggest fans. Says Sosa, "The kids are telling them every day, 'Mom, I'm so proud of you because I'm learning, you're helping me now, you're coming to my school more often.'" And as those Featherstone graduation flowers attest, these kids know firsthand how much a show of family support means to the success of an education.

If you have any comments about this article or questions for for the author, please send them to: alex@coursecrafters.com.