Group puts parents’ voice in school reform

Yawu Miller

The Boston Parent Organizing Network’s push for Family and Community Outreach coordinators began with a 2004 meeting of 14 parents with Mayor Thomas Menino and School Superintendent Thomas Payzant.

While Menino questioned whether the school-parent liaison positions could be funded, he and Payzant agreed that the idea was a good one.

A year later, 17 such coordinators have been placed in Boston Public schools in a pilot project BPON hopes to replicate on a system-wide basis.

“There’s a high correlation between the level of parental engagement and student performance,” says BPON Executive Director Caprice Taylor Mendez.

At the same time, members of the BPON network complained of a lack of day-to-day communication between schools and parents, who are often left in the dark about everything from the curriculum their children are studying to whether their children are cutting classes.

It was a case of the latter that drove the point home for Taylor. She recalls a Cape Verdean mother who found out her daughter was skipping classes and leaving school early only after she had sit-down meetings with several of her daughter’s teachers.

She followed up the meeting with a stake-out of the school’s front door where she spied her daughter and several friends slipping out.

“When she asked the teacher why she didn’t tell her that her daughter had missed so many days, he said he thought she was sick,” Mendez said. “This is one of the issues we plan to address this year.

Parental involvement is not just BPON’s raison d’etre, it’s also the group’s modus operandi. The parents identify the challenges they want to overcome and then supply the solutions and the muscle to move the policy makers to action.

Thus, before the city hired the 17 Family Coordinators, BPON parents helped draft the job description, mandating that those placed in schools with large immigrant populations be fluent in other languages. They also requested that the Family Coordinators work on schedules that are more conducive to parent meetings than a simple nine-to-five scenario.

BPON works with a network of community based organizations to encourage parental involvement in the city’s schools. Working with funders including the Boston Foundation, the seven-year-old organization shares grant money with five major member organizations — ACORN, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, City Life/Vida Urbana, Sociedad Latina and the East Boston Ecumenical Council.

Working out of a cramped basement office in a Northeastern University building, the three staff members of the Boston Parent Organizing Network have leveraged their organization into a school reform powerhouse.

The grants BPON receives and shares with its key members enable the organization to conduct intensive organizing campaigns. Each of the five member organizations work with 15 core parent organizers whose job it is to work with the parents in their schools on reform efforts.

The organizations also lead their own campaigns. In East Boston, EBEC is working on supporting schools to engage diverse parents on the parent councils and school site councils.

ACORN is working on a pilot program aimed retraining low-performing teachers.

“It’s very costly to remove teachers from the system,” said Mendez. “This is an investment in the teachers.”

As part of a broader coalition, BPON works with several dozen other organizations in the city advocating for the needs of parents.

“Education reform, like any kind of reform, can often miss the mark unless it understands the context in which the reform efforts are being implemented,” Taylor says. “Often times you can create more chaos if you don’t understand the needs of the people you’re serving.”

In the wake of news last year that parents living outside of Boston were sending their children to the city’s exam schools, the school department began requiring that parents prove residency in the city by showing leases or utility bills. Although there are provisions for homeless families, many people are unwilling to think of themselves that way.

“There are many families that don’t have a stable, traditional home,” Mendez explained. “Many share the cost of rent. We have to make the Boston Public Schools administration aware of the unique nature of the affordable housing crisis.”

While still a teenager in New Haven, Taylor Mendez got her start in community activism as a high school student when she volunteered with a Greenpeace chapter that met in her neighborhood.

Later, while studying at Boston College, she worked at the Hispanic Office of Planning and Evaluation, working with teenagers in a peer mentoring group. Mendez also worked with the Hyde Square Task Force and Iniciativa, a Latino state-wide educational alliance before landing at BPON.

The organization has enjoyed considerable successes in the two years that Mendez has been at the helm. Now, as the Mayor is looking for a replacement for Payzant, who plans to retire, BPON is looking to make sure parents have a seat at the table during the hiring process.

The group is also looking to expand the number of Family Outreach Coordinators in the schools from 17 schools to all 146 schools in the system. Mendez says the more involvement from parents, the better.

“What we find is that there is a long way to go to have parents involved in the schools,” she comments.