A beginning to building community relationships

After months of planning by many people, my school held its first, in what we hope to become annual, community bash last night.  The bash was planned to be an event to bring the parents and community to the school as a way of building relationships.

The system in which I teach went from one mega high school seven years ago to community high schools with multiple feeder elementary schools and one middle school.  The problem that we began to encounter is that the parental support started lagging.  I have talked to many educator friends of mine around the country and the lack of parental support, especially at the middle and high school levels, is not and isolated problem.  At Bryant we asked ourselves, what could we, as educators, do to change this situation and change the culture of our school cluster?

At Bryant we are fortunate to be in a partnership with the Alabama Consortium for Educational Renewal, an arm of the University of Alabama, which helps our school in numerous ways.  ACER is also in partnership with one of the high schools in the county system.  At the county school, the partnership created a renewal project between the community and the school, and it has grown and helped to revitalize that community over the past several years.  At Bryant we decided that we needed to do something of a similiar manner.

Planning began in May and much of it was coordinated through Google Docs and Dropbox.  Technology is great and an easy way to get things accomplished without having to hold meetings once a week!

The event was a success.  We had a great turnout and everyone enjoyed the games, food, marching bad, cheerleaders, etc.

The sad part to the whole event is that we had to plan and host an event to get some parents to come visit our campus and mingle with their respective schools faculty.  Parents are willing to come to a festival, but many will not set foot in a school unless their child is in trouble.  

At this point I could start a rather long rambling of ranting on parents and how they expect teachers to be responsible for raising their children, and then when said children don’t meet their expectations they start ranting on how the teacher failed the child, but I won’t. 

Instead, I’ll just leave it at this...

The African proverb, It takes a village to raise a child, is true and I hope this event will be the starting point of building greater community connections and ensuring the success of our students in a full partnership - schools, faculties, parents, and community   members.  We all win in the long run!