Citizen blogger Whitney Hoffman continues her report from the Citizens Convention:
The first break-out session I attended was one on Education. The ideas of finding a leader, getting better financing, and looking for after-school programs all were welcomed as great ideas. But it felt like that was a very top-down approach to education, which seems best managed from a more bottom-up approach because nothing motivates people like how to best educate their children.
We spoke about making neighborhood schools integrated into the community, and about how they become centers and hubs for community activity, bringing in not only parents but also residents otherwise unaffiliated with the schools. Community open houses or meetings with City Councilpeople at the local schools were discussed as ideas to help people identify the neighborhood school as an important part of their community, whether they had school-age children or not.
With so many charter schools throughout the city, many people don’t know anything about the schools in their neighborhood. That has to change if we want to change education. Strong principals doing community outreach was also mentioned as a way to involve the immediate community in strengthening the schools. As one participant stated, “It’s the most local and parochial issue: Where is my child going to school?” And it’s also the reason so many people leave the city for the suburbs - to get the perceived best education possible for their children.
Ideas were exchanged about educating parents along with children; making schools a place where children could come early and stay late; taking advantage of extended-hours programs that might include art, music, developing skills and hobbies beyond just video games; and starting to see school as a place of caring and concern rather than just a work place.
The teachers at the table, including Marlene, Marilyn and Norma, all agreed there needs to be a heavy emphasis on early-childhood programs and education, to give kids the best start in school and identify any learning problems early, so that these can be addressed before kids start to really struggle and get turned off by school. Anger-management programs, like Eye to Eye, and conflict-resolution skills were also suggested as ways of reducing larger issues later on. (I was particularly vocal about wondering why we don’t adopt reading curriculums like Wilson Reading across the board, shown to work on remediating reading for kids with learning issues, rather than hope someone catches a dyslexic child before they get into serious academic trouble.)
I was impressed by the passion and caring of everyone at the table. The big picture here is that we need to start making schools the center of our community, showing children, teachers and parents that schools are the place to come together and work as a team for a better future, rather than as yet another place of division and conflict. These are changes that can happen whether the state or the city manage the schools; these are issues we can address today in every school in the area, by simply starting to care and make our schools a cornerstone of our communities again.
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