When I think about the importance of parent involvement in schools, I’m often led to my past and my upbringing. I can remember my mom participating in PTA meetings and open school night. She was always around even when I didn’t want her around. I knew my dad was working and I appreciated my mom, but I wanted my dad to be involved. Upon entering high school I realized the importance of parent involvement because that’s when didn’t want it, but I needed it and was too embarrassed to try to communicate it.

When talking with other parents and their children, often times I hear parents resenting some of the ways their parents parented, but never seeking to change it. I hear children desiring their parents support but not knowing how to communicate it. I see schools filled with women and no men.

Before I started working at the Academy of Urban Planning High School as a Parent Coordinator I used to visit my son’s school, I.S. 308. I would attend PTA meetings and open school night. Each time I visited, I would see mothers and female teachers. When I took my son to the football practice, I saw mothers, but no fathers or uncles. I kept asking myself, where are the fathers? Where are the men? Where are the male teachers and male role models?

I began to pray to God. I said God, please send some men into the school system so that our boys will have some male role models to look up to. I said God, I don’t have a problem with the mothers being present and the women teachers. I just have a problem with the absence of the fathers, men - the male role models. Well the next morning God answered me and told me to leave my job to become a teacher. Before I could figure things out I was enrolled in the Teaching Fellows Program and through that process, I ended up as a Parent Coordinator with a license to teach.

Becoming a Parent Coordinator has been a very rewarding. It has allowed me to reach out to parents - women as well as men and their children. It has taught me some of the challenges around their involvement in school activities at the high school level. Some of the challenges are: parents have long work hours; schools are not always welcoming to parents; parents believe that children can handle high school on their own; immigration issues; broken families; and a lack of communication. I’ve also come to understand that just because a parent does not participate in school activities, that does not mean they are not involved in their child’s education.

With the help of my principal Monique Darrisaw, my PTA, parent body, and community, the gathering of this information has helped us produce professional development, which has created change in the way we view parent involvement. We have partnered with community-based organizations that have helped our school to implement workshops that help our parents feel more welcome, build communication, and deal with immigration issues. These workshops are tailored to the availability of the parents.

My first year as Academy of Urban Planning’s Parent Coordinator, I was introduced to advisories, which are very effective in encouraging students to talk and share about different issues. That year I embarked on starting an all-boys advisory where the young men could speak candidly about issues concerning being a young man. It was a huge success even though there were some challenges due a lack of man power.

My second year as Parent Coordinator, we introduced our first parent leadership conference. It was a conference where parents, teachers, students, community-based organizations, and partners work together to form workshops that are tailored to meet our parents’, students’, and community’s needs. Our theme was “By the Parents for the Parents to Empower the Parents”. Our keynote speaker, author and poet Dr. Lindamichellebaron, wowed our parents with her poetry and stories. Workshops were held on topics such as a father’s role in school, college awareness, parent leadership, and communication, to name a few.

Each experience with parents helped us to understand the importance of engaging parents. Each experience showed us another way to do it. We held a father and sons breakfast, which engaged fathers with their sons through games and conversation. We had parent’s night out, where we go to Broadway plays, basketball, and baseball games.

Some experiences even became more personal and intimate, where I had to encourage parents when their child was destined for prison, even visiting with them or for them as a support. Some experiences have taken me to hospitals and to grave sites. Some experiences have caused me to meet with fathers and their sons individually to work on a broken relationship. It has allowed me to work with husbands and wives, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters.

Whatever it takes to keep our parents involved in the life and education of our children, that’s what I’ll do. My only prayer is that God would continue to bless me, to model parent involvement with my own children.

Submitted by Dale R. Donaldson, Sr., Parent Coordinator, Academy of Urban Planning High School, Brooklyn