The East Durham Children’s Initiative (EDCI), the local non-profit that works within East Durham to create a continuum of services that prepare children birth through high school for college or career, recently hosted a Parent Advocate Workshop for parents of children enrolled at Y.E. Smith Elementary School.

The workshop was attended by about 40 parents who were split into two sessions, one facilitated in English and one facilitated in Spanish. EDCI Parent Advocate Carla Marlin Smith answered our Partnership Q&A to help outline how parents can best advocate for their elementary students. Thanks Carla and EDCI!

What are the primary factors that contribute to student success?
Though not the only factors that help students be successful, things such as parent involvement, teacher expectations, and student self-confidence are certainly significant. Parents can actually control these factors unlike other issues such as social economic status, race, etc.

What role(s) specifically should the parent play in their elementary student’s education?
Parents should constantly communicate with the school and develop the knowledge/skills necessary to become effective advocates for their children. Parents should be engaged and supportive; ask your child how his or her day was every day and make sure your child is doing the homework. Don’t just assume they’ll get it done.
Parents should be their child’s teacher outside of the school environment.  Provide them with opportunities to learn, take advantage of free events like a trip to the museum, and read with your child even if that means reading street signs, billboards, etc.

How can parents encourage learning?
Be a good role model. If parents show that they enjoy learning, then their child will also want to be a good student. Children need to see parents reading, learning, and trying to obtain a higher education and/or occupational training.

What are two ways a parent can advocate for their child?
This may seem pretty basic, but parents need to make sure they are communicating with the school and make sure the school has their most current contact information on file. Also, parents should know what their child should be learning. The Durham Public Schools Web site includes information on what children should be learning in each grade.

What do parents say discourages them from advocating for their children?
Many parents do not recognize the wealth of knowledge they can bring to the educational partnership between the family and the school.  As a result, they do not believe that they are knowledgeable enough to effectively advocate on behalf of their child.  I believe a significant part of my role as an advocate is to help them overcome their fears/doubts and to turn their deficit thinking into a positive so that they can educate themselves, as well as the child. One of the most common concerns I hear is when parents say they can’t help their child with their math homework because they don’t remember 4th grade math. I tell them just how common a fear that is and that they should shift the focus. Ask your child to teach you the math lesson, not the other way around.

What resources do parents have?
The school, Parent Advocates, community organizations, churches, and other parents – who truly are each others’ greatest resource. Parents should be sharing information within their community (i.e. - when school meetings are, what your child is learning, your experiences with teachers).  Consider this – while you’re busy raising your child and changing your child’s world, there’s another child out there that doesn’t have that.

Parents need to consider that their child’s education begins well before kindergarten. How can parents raise children to be good learners?
By helping children develop a basic knowledge of themselves and the world around them, parents can better prepare their children to be academically and socially prepared for school.  Activities such as reading daily with their children; singing songs; helping them recognize their name; puzzles/games; trips to the park, grocery store, zoo, museums, etc.; and helping them to name objects can improve academic readiness.  Also setting rules; developing routines; talking with children; discouraging negative behaviors; and allowing them to do simple choirs prepares them to interact socially in a classroom.

Did you know that Durham has been named one of 100 Best Communities for Young People?  This is the third year that Durham has received this honor, celebrated each year by America's Promise and ING as part of the Grad Nation campaign. One hundred communities are recognized through this award, each community touted for “effectively providing youth with the Five Promises and working to increase graduation rates.”

Even better, Durham’s Partnership for Children was one of five programs/organizations highlighted from across the community.  Here’s an excerpt from the America’s Promise Alliance Web site, which outlines vibrant community programs that help make our youth more successful:

• Durham’s Partnership for Children, serves youth by spearheading multiple initiatives which have worked to expand health services and improve systems for young children.
• Through collaboration with Durham Public Schools, a comprehensive Transition to Kindergarten Plan was developed. This partnership resulted in further analysis of the Kindergarten Health Assessment forms in order to evaluate the health status of children as they enter kindergarten.
• The Durham Youth Commission is made up of 30 members from each Durham high school that participate in activities including working with the Interfaith Food Shuttle, filling backpacks with food for children and picking up litter in Durham neighborhoods.
• The East Durham Children’s Initiative provides a holistic support system and resources for children and families within a 120 block, poverty-stricken area in Durham.
• To help 11th grade students focus on the 300 most missed words on the SAT, a unique partnership with the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce and Urban Planet Mobile is helping local students by texting them a Word of the Day including an audio link to definitions Sunday through Thursday nights.

See other 2011 competition winners here.

An early October feature in Time Magazine that reviews the Pew Charitable Trusts report, Transforming Public Education: Pathway to a Pre-K-12 Future, begins with the following words:

Take two kids, one from a low-income family, the other middle class. Let them run around and do little-kid things in their respective homes and then, at age 5, enroll them in kindergarten. Research shows that when the first day of school rolls around, the child from the low-income household will be as many as 1.5 years behind grade level in terms of language and prereading and premath skills. The middle-class kid will be as many as 1.5 years ahead. This means that, by the time these two 5-year-olds start school, the achievement gap between them is already as great as three years. (Rethinking Pre-K: 5 Ways to Fix Preschool, Kayla Webley)

If it is so blatantly obvious that children start kindergarten academically and socially behind their peers because of poor financial circumstances and lack of high-quality preschool, then why isn’t early childhood education guaranteed for all children? 

North Carolina has long been a champion of high-quality pre-kindergarten education funding.  Yet, the waitlists for these vital programs are long – and growing.  Every year advocates have to fight for continued funding to support these programs.

The problem, according to Michele Palermo, coordinator of early-childhood initiatives at the Rhode Island Department of Education, is that decision makers still aren’t completely convinced that high-quality pre-k is necessary for all students – only for some.

So what happens to those students who aren’t fortunate enough to receive that first, pre-kindergarten year of vital education and preparation?

In North Carolina, results from a Duke University study released earlier this year show that third-graders have higher standardized reading and math scores and lower special education placement rates in counties that had received more funding for Smart Start and More at Four when those children were younger.  The research concluded that positive impact was greater in counties that had received higher allocations for Smart Start and More at Four.

Research tells us that not investing in early education is the equivalent of not investing in entire counties, entire communities.

In America, one in four public school children drop out before they finish high school. That’s 7,000 students every school day.  As a state, North Carolina ranks 25th in the nation for rate of graduation.  According to the Department of Public Instruction’s 4-Year Cohort Graduation Rate report, 73.9 percent of Durham Public Schools students graduated in the 10-11 school year.

American’s Promise Alliance created the Grad Nation campaign in 2010 to help end the dropout crisis.  The goal of the campaign is to achieve a 90 percent graduation rate nationwide by 2020, with no school graduating less than 80 percent of its students. 

From a 2010 report by the Alliance for Excellent Education that outlines the economic benefits from lowering dropout rates across the country, an analysis of Charlotte, NC (the only NC city in the report) concluded that moving even just one student from dropout status to graduate status would make positive contributions to a local economy.  The projected benefits if just 1,000 local dropouts had graduated are outlined below.  These 1,000 new graduates would likely:

• earn $9 million in additional earnings each year;
• spend an additional $1 million each year purchasing vehicles
• buy homes worth $23 million more than what they would likely have spent without a diploma
• support 70 new jobs in the region
• increase the gross regional product by $12 million

In order to gauge progress toward the Grad Nation goal of raising high school graduations rates, America’s Promise Alliance and the U.S. Department of Education will track ten measures that researchers show predict student success.  The first on that list…preschool enrollment.  Other measures include reading test scores, health care access, expanded learning time participation, and successful promotion from ninth grade.

To learn more, visit www.americaspromise.org/gradnation.