How Marginalized Families Are Pushed Out of PTAs

“When white, affluent parents come into a school that has a high percentage of less-affluent students of color, the more advantaged group tends to take over parent organizations and unintentionally marginalize the parent community that was already there.”

One of the most eye-opening realities I've become acquainted with since boldly (perhaps naively?) entering the ed-tech space in the last three years is the byzantine collection of systems, organizations and processes by which school systems really get managed. And both because of this, and contributing to it is an entrenched set of 900 pound gorillas that currently dominate much of the ed-tech space. Of course I usually think about this from an innovation standpoint, and I'm not the only one. How is it possible to drive innovation in such a system. The answer, usually, is "with great difficulty."

It seems, from reading this, that the way the systems are put together create myriad other problems as well. In the case of this article, it's driving what seems to be an unintentional, but quite real disenfranchisement of lower income parents in more affluent communities.

What if parents got a grade for involvement?

“There’s nothing punitive about it,” Holloway says. “It’s just a wake-up call for parents, just to say, hey, you need to do better.”

But “doing better” might be an oversimplification for some Mississippi parents. With cyclical poverty as a barrier to parental involvement and student achievement, some worry that the bill could further burden parents having a hard time.

I understand the notion of a "wake-up call" and I'm all for encouraging parent engagement. It is, after all, what The ChalkBird is meant to enable. But the goal of parent engagement is to help create a strong partnership between schools and parents. This seems like a recipe for building an unnecessarily adversarial relationship.

Educational engagement a two-way street

Great overview of the importance of family engagement in schools. A couple of key quotes:

And we need to get to know not only our child's teacher but also the principal. If families do this proactively, when situations arise, it is more likely to be a collaboration in finding a solution vs. an “us vs. them.”

Authors also recommend that a family engagement director be a cabinet level position directly under the superintendent to ensure the parent and family voice is represented at every level of decision-making, not just as a check box for making sure we’re communicated to after decisions are made. The culture of parent and family engagement starts at the top.

D’Lisa Crain

It's inspiring to see from this Education Week article that there are school systems that are willing to commit serious reources and investment to driving family engagement with the school system.

Under her leadership, the district’s office of family and school partnerships has expanded from just Crain and an administrative assistant to nine employees, who support the work of more than 100 interpreters, child-care providers, and other personnel.

Create help requests without events.

If you've had to create requests for help in The ChalkBird for things like classroom supplies on a regular basis, there's been an extra annoying step you need to go through: you've needed to create an event for that request that doesn't exist. Well, now, if you have things like requests for classroom supplies or anything that you need help with, but which doesn't have an event, you can now do it with one less step.

Just go to the Help page, and at the top you'll see a new link named "New help request"

Click that link and you can create a help request with no event. Everything else about this help request is exactly the same as you're used to. You still set a due date which will always appear on your calendar. And you can still send out notifications and reminders just like before.

Finally, as always, the due date will still appear on the calendar of any parent that agrees to help.

And for those of you who have been pushing ChalkBird Help requests to the limit, you'll be excited to know that this enhancement is merely preparation for a huge set of improvements: specialized help items that will enable you to schedule volunteer slots, monetary donations, and even online payments.

Universal Notifications - Keeping ALL Parents in the Loop

Up until recently email notifications for announcements and for events and help requests only went to parents that had accepted their ChalkBird invitations. However, for any number of reasons, not all parents of kids in a class accept their invitations. Perhaps they never received the invitation because it got caught in a spam filter. Or perhaps the parent just didn't act immediately, and like so many things that come through email, they just forgot about it. That is, after all, one of the main problems The ChalkBird is here to solve though, right?

Whatever the reason, we heard from room parents that they were worried that some parents would end up being completely out of the loop with what's happening in the class. And as one parent put it, that's "not good."

So as of now, whenever you send an announcement or create either an event or help request and select "Send notification," the email that gets sent to ChalkBird parents will also go to any parents that have been invited to The ChalkBird, but have not yet accepted their invitation. The email that goes to these invited parents contains all the same information that is in the ChalkBird parents' emails. In the case of announcements, that's the full announcement text (so they'll get the important information). In the case of events, they'll see the full event details so they can keep it in their calendar even if they don't yet have access to The ChalkBird's built-in calendar. In the case of help requests, they'll see the name and description of the request. To actually contribute, they'll still need to accept their invitation and create an account. Fortunately, all email notifications to invited parents will also contain a link to the original invitation right there in the notification.

Hopefully, this great new feature will help room parents and teachers rest assured that everyone is staying in the loop.

Our first room parent-requested feature

Are you the teacher or room parent of a class that has students in multiple grades? Would it be helpful to be able to send messages just to parents of children in a certain grade? Now you can, thanks to a feature request from one of our room parents a few weeks ago.

The ChalkBird now features individual student grade levels and grade level conversations. Here’s how to use this. If you’re a teacher or room parent, first you’ll need to give grade levels to each student. Just go to the "Roster" under "People," and for a student, click “Profile.”

In the pop up, select “Edit.”

Then in the Edit Student Profile form, you’ll see a new selector: “Grade.” Click this and choose the grade level for the student. Then click “Save” and you’re done with that student.

Do this for each student in your class, and you’re good to go. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.

Once you’ve done this, when you go to “Conversations” you will now see entries in the recipients list that correspond to whatever grades you put in for your students. Conversations to, for instance, “Second grade parents” will only go to parents of students in the second grade.

Note, you must have students (with parents who have accepted their ChalkBird invitations) in at least two different grades for these group recipients to appear. I hope this makes life a little bit easier for some parents and teachers out there.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to reach out using the “Contact Us” button.