02/19/99

Paying Lip Service to Parent Involvement

"If teachers and school administrators want parents involved, especially the parents whose children have problems, they need to start believing parents instead of treating them like nuisances or worse."

Parents want the best possible education for their children and the majority of them are willing to collaborate with educators to achieve that end. When learning or adjustment problems surface, parents are often the first to notice and ask for help. If the problems persist despite everyone's best efforts, parents want and need to join the search for solutions, because they are, after all, the lifetime educators of their children. Teachers, schools, principals and classmates come and go in the lives of our children. Parents remain.

And if parents run into defensiveness or outright hostility when they ask for help, the professionals are failing them. More importantly, when we alienate a child's parents, we risk losing the child as well.

I recently heard from a parent whose 8th-grade son had a five-year history of declining, erratic academic performance (everything from A's to F's in the same subjects). She had spent hundreds of hours and over $2,000 for independent evaluations of him. The independent evaluations produced diagnoses of dyslexia and dysgraphia (forms of Learning Disability) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD.) Special educators at the boy's school had zeroed in on behavioral and emotional problems as the underlying cause for his academic decline.

Although the mother disagreed with the school findings, she accepted a Social-Emotional Maladjustment label when her son was in the 3rd through 7th grades, because she wanted him to get the 90 minutes per day of support services offered. Nevertheless, her son's academic performance continued to decline. At that point, the mother renewed her insistence on a primary diagnosis of Learning Disability, in line with the findings of the independent evaluators. Her wishes were reluctantly granted. Now in the 8th grade, her son receives 90 minutes per day of support services in an overcrowded "special" study hall, where the teacher provides sporadic help with assignments and no remedial help for poor reading skills or illegible handwriting. The mother also reports that despite above average intelligence, his grades are poor, and he is in treatment for depression.

There's no way of knowing whether different support services would have produced a different outcome for this child. But four years of wrangling, in the face of such steady deterioration in a child's academic performance, seems like an outrageously long time. Had the mother, educators and child been able to agree on the problems and interventions, and then work cooperatively to apply them, this highly motivated mother may well have been singing the school's praises instead of considering legal action. She is not only thinking about moving her family to another school district; she is also considering enrolling her son in a private school and taking steps to require the school district to pay for it.

As professionals in charge of educating children, the burden is on us to find ways to collaborate with parents in the process of teaching their children. It's not always easy. Parents get angry and accusatory, stirring anger in us when questioning our competence or intentions. Negative parental reactions often have a basis in fact, especially when parents take the time to learn about their child's disability, make suggestions, and see their suggestions ignored in the special education process. However, when teachers and administrators establish clear home/school communication expectations and guidelines from the beginning of the school year, many misunderstandings can be avoided. Clashes will inevitably occur, but they need to be addressed directly and honestly, keeping the child's educational progress in the forefront. Everyone loses when a child fails.

LINKS:

Parent involvement references
Levels of parent involvement
Benefits of parent involvement

Please send questions or comments to bbruno@snet.net.