Research
2009-2010 Funded Project
The Grassroots Parent-to-Community Pilot Program: Supporting and Empowering Parents of At-Risk Students
Dr. Madeleine Grumet is working with Orange High School to explore and develop innovative methods for empowering low-income parents. The project seeks to provide resources and support structures to better enable parent-school communication in Orange High School. This project intends to facilitate the formation of and evaluate the effectiveness of grassroots “community meetings” as a method of understanding low-income high school parent concerns and increasing parents’ sense of agency in their child’s schooling.
Based on the teacher-identified needs of the school, the project will facilitate a four-month pilot study designed to provide support structures and resources that enable communication between parents of 9th grade minority Orange High students and the school. Two parent-led community groups will be established within the Orange County community and will meet on a bi-monthly basis in the communities of local leaders to identify parent concerns, thoughts, strategies that improve upon parent-school communication, impediments to their involvement, and plan for school improvement. Within the project’s loose project goals, the community groups will create culturally and community-defined meeting styles, goals, discussions, questions and self-designed project implementation.
The main objectives include:
- Providing resources and support structures to enable parent school communication. This will include the support and advisement of parent-led groups that will identify parent concerns, thoughts, strategies to improve their communication with the school, impediments to their involvement, and strategies for school improvement.
- Documentation of parent-led conversations and facilitation of bi-monthly communication between parents and teacher.
- Data collection and analysis that will directly contribute to a growing body of literature that is documenting the central role parental involvement plays in improving retention and overall academic achievement. The unique nature of this project is that it focuses on parent involvement in high schools, generally ignored in the literature.
The project’s goal is to establish structures where parents identify their concerns, voice impediments to their involvement, and offer strategies to improve parent-school communication and to conduct research that will contribute to scholarly literature documenting the relationship the processes developed in the service of greater communication between families and the school.
