Could Seattle train, fund parent mentors in schools? | Ed Lab Revisited
Could Seattle train, fund parent mentors in schools? | Ed Lab Revisited
Jan. 28, 2024 at 6:00 am Updated Jan. 28, 2024 at 6:00 am
3 of 3 | Chicago families rally in front of the Illinois state Capitol to support the Parent Mentor Program. The parent involvement model has been tried in Washington, but not sustained. (Bridget Murphy / Palenque LSNA)
By
Education Lab engagement reporter
Education Lab is a Seattle Times project that spotlights promising approaches to persistent challenges in public education. The Seattle Foundation serves as the fiscal sponsor for Education Lab, which is supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Learn more about Ed Lab.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories looking back at stories covered by Education Lab over the last 10 years, and examining what has changed.
Getting parents to support students by volunteering for at least 100 hours in the classroom — that’s been the goal for participants in the Parent Mentor Program in Chicago for more than 25 years.
It’s one of the many initiatives of Palenque LSNA (formerly Logan Square Neighborhood Association), which organizes around a multitude of community issues identified by families, including housing, education, immigration services and others.
Some elements of this initiative have been tried in Seattle and elsewhere in Washington. But one researcher says our state hasn’t committed to the kind of depth and funding that has worked so well in Chicago and beyond.
Why we reported on LSNA: Many parent and family engagement programs exist in Washington schools and communities. But in 2013, the LSNA program caught the interest of Education Lab editor Linda Shaw as it grew to 65 schools in Illinois and earned $1 million in expansion funds from the Illinois State Board of Education.
In the original Logan Square schools where the program started, principals and teachers credited the parent mentors’ support for helping many students improve in math and reading. The consistent presence of parents who had received immersive training and had a “substantive role” in helping kids made the program a standout when compared to other PTA and family night-type programs, Shaw wrote.
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It’s now used in 245 schools nationwide. And it’s earned recognition as a national model for how community groups can help families and schools form a powerful partnership in helping students succeed.
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What we learned: From the beginning, the program was designed as a partnership, with the hope that teachers would learn as much from parents as parents would gain from watching and talking with teachers, Shaw wrote.
This involves a lot of intentional relationship-building and detailed organizational work, including recruiting and training parents, arranging for background checks, mediating conflicts, raising money to cover the parents’ stipends and training, and hiring coordinators to help manage the partnership at each participating school.
This work takes time, trust and money. In 2013, Shaw reported that participating Logan Square schools contributed $5,000 to $10,000 a year, with the LSNA adding an additional $40,000 to $45,000 from government agencies and foundation grants.
There’s no doubt that parental involvement plays an important role in academic achievement, and growing research backs this up.
For her story, Shaw interviewed parent Monica Soto-Espinoza, who came to the U.S. as a teenager and never finished high school. It took LSNA four tries to recruit Soto-Espinoza for the Parent Mentor Program, and she had doubts about what she could offer to the program and her child.
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We caught up with Soto-Espinoza this month. Today, she’s a unconditional cheerleader for the program, and she continues to lead trainings and meetings for families, keeping them running virtually through the pandemic.
“It’s not about the hierarchy, but it’s always about the goal. It’s about inspiring and admiring each other,” she said. “Once you do that change within yourself, you’re able to achieve a change in the schools and our communities. We’re not just parents in schools. We’re activists, we’re organizers.”
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Did anything change? The Parent Mentor Program model continues to expand in different ways across the country through the newly formed Parent Engagement Institute.
Run by LSNA and Southwest Organizing Project, the institute teaches other community organizations and school districts how to establish their own programs. They’ve also received state funding to sustain parent mentors across Illinois. In 2012, the institute received $1 million; today, that’s grown to about $14 million.
The Parent Engagement Institute now recruits and trains between 1,600 and 1,800 parents — historically mostly Latina and Black mothers — to volunteer in classrooms to work with children for two hours a day, four days a week. Many of these parent mentors have not only supported students but have also advanced their own education and aspirations. After they complete their 100-hour commitment, mentors become eligible to receive a $1,500 stipend, and many continue on.
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Leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Parent Mentor Program, the Institute did a long-term study that found 92% of children of parent mentors had graduated from high school, and of these graduates, 87% were attending or graduated from college. Some of the children of the original parent mentors are now mentors themselves.
The institute has since helped programs start in Asheville, N.C.; Newark, N.J.; Boston; rural Colorado; and Arkansas.
What’s happening in Washington: Shaw initially spoke with University of Washington professor Ann Ishimaru, who researches racial equity in education and how families are able to influence processes and decision-making around their children’s education. Ishimaru told Shaw that schools can perpetuate a toxic cycle: If teachers organize events and parents don’t show, teachers conclude that families just don’t care.
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Families do care. But the solution may need to come through other community organizations, as seen with Palenque LSNA and its dozens of partner groups.
Ishimaru also cautions, as she did in Shaw’s story, that there are no shortcuts to success with family involvement and one successful model may not be a panacea for all communities.
Some communities attempting to replicate the Parent Mentor Program “sort of try it, but not in the kind of in-depth way that [LSNA] has invested in over time,” Ishimaru said. It may not just be the approach that’s lacking, she added, but the funding, too.
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That seemed to be the case with an organization called Community & Parents for Public Schools Seattle. Parent Engagement Institute Director Bridget Murphy said Seattle parents and leaders came to Chicago to train with them and had begun making inroads. In 2018, she received an email from one of the group’s leaders saying their efforts would “sadly” no longer continue “after a couple of years of real struggle to fund continuing Parent Mentorship.”
Nothing to the scope and scale of Palenque LSNA’s Parent Mentor Program has been funded or sustained over time in Washington.
Ishimaru continues to watch how family-school partnerships are developing in Washington today. New models of family involvement include Academic Parent-Teacher Teams for building relationships with and involving families in schools and co-designing policies and practices with families and communities.
She says multiple schools and community organizations are developing the leadership of parents on smaller scales, which is “really important and generative and there’s further yet to go.”
Jenn Smith: jennsmith@seattletimes.com;