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Now, once I got onboard, my main goal was to create what is called in VISTA terms, an Action Team.
We call that our Parent Advisory Board for Partnerships
I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a wonderful group of parents
Your parents are amazing and my job wouldn’t have been the same without you all
With the Parent Advisory Board, we really got a lot of things done
One of the first things that we did was create the parent orientation
It started out as a parent information meetingthat was the first version in April
It was good, but we’ve tweaked it since then
Now we hold it in October when it is probably more useful for parents
And it’s become our orientation at the beginning of the school year
We also created the college readiness conference, which, again, started out as something different
We had a parent workshop series, we had that for the first time last year
That was a great success and then we tweaked it and built upon that.
We also created the Family and Community Fun night.
We will be holding our second one next month
That’s a really fun and exciting event, and I hope to see most of you all there too
Another initiative that I’m very proud of is the SAFE program
which is the school and family empowerment program that we created with Sherman middle school
school with the help of some wonderful staff members there.
With some ideas from the Parent Advisory Board we also came up with having parent field trips
We took our first one in December and that was to a college
I don’t know if there are any parents here who attended that trip
but I think, from what I heard, that it was a pretty successful evening.
Another big thing that we’ve focused on since I’ve been here is improving communication with parents
We created a newsletter that goes out at the end of the month
We make phone calls to parents to remind them of upcoming events.
We have students talk to parents, we have parents talking to other parents
we are trying to hit up parents as much as possible in many different ways
We try to be as effective as we can.
Now, I just want to point out really quickly that this photo is from one of our very first Parent Advisory Board meetings
It was in August of 2009
Since it was in August, I don’t really know why I’m wearing a sweater, some things can’t be explained
But, again, you can see that everyone is excited, it wasn’t even our idea to take the photo.
Parents said we have to take a photo, we have to document this, this is the start of something great.
And it really was. That was the beginning of all of these initiatives.