Parents voice concerns at school district's listening tour

Leopold Elementary School was the site of the first community conversation. Nichols and Cheatham are on a listening tour across the city. (Melissa Behling/Madison Commons)

Parents from Madison Metropolitan School District are looking to be more involved in their child’s school, and administrators are listening.

At a community conversation at Leopold Elementary School last Tuesday, the first of the MMSD’s listening tour, parents discussed their positive interactions with teachers and also voiced their concerns about issues throughout MMSD.

“We’re nowhere near where we need to be yet, but we’re making good progress,” Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said. “We are insisting that every school have an improvement plan that is not just a plan on paper, but a plan that makes sure our schools are going through disciplined processes of planning, implementation and making adjustments along the way based on what is happening with real children.”

MMSD wants to make sure parents are involved as it works toward its vision: every school will be a thriving school that prepares every student to graduate from high school ready to succeed in college, their career and their community.

Over the past decade, however, this vision hasn’t been realized. The school district persistently sees an achievement gap between its black and white students.

Nichelle Nichols, former Chief Academic Officer for the Dane County Boys and Girls Club, became director of the MMSD Department of Youth and Community Engagement two months ago.  She facilitates the community discussions with Superintendent Cheatham. 

“We are focusing our efforts on how we can better engage family members and youth, making sure that your voices are at the center of the work we do,” Nichols said.

In small groups at Leopold, parents discussed and then presented their ideas about how schools can better include parents in their improvement plans and how teachers could be better trained to serve students.

There are some great things going on at MMSD

One initiative that parents found to be helpful in increasing engagement was the Parent Liaison officers, who go door-to-door to speak with parents who don’t feel comfortable or are unable to come to their child’s school to express their opinions.

They also mentioned having positive interactions with teachers at Leopold who go beyond what is required in their job description. Some examples were teachers who came to the ice cream social, a librarian who greeted students at a literacy event, and a teacher who took extra time to fill out daily behavior reports for a student. But there is a spectrum of teachers, one parent said, so not all of them are willing to dedicate the extra time and effort to activities like these. 

But there is work to be done

Parents suggested requiring more specialized and ongoing staff training, including how to conduct an effective parent-teacher conference. They believe there should be a greater focus on individual teachers as a point of contact that could establish trust and help parents feel that their voice will be heard at their child’s school. 

“I think before you can incorporate parent voices, you have to build trust,” another parent said. “And I don’t think there’s trust with all families in the schools. Certain groups and communities have been under-served by education for so long – it’s hard to build trust.”

 A bit of confusion

One parent, who just enrolled his child in kindergarten at MMSD, was concerned with how to become more engaged when he didn’t feel his child’s school provided him enough information to know where to begin. 

“It takes a lot of effort to…try to get answers to our questions. But we don’t even know what questions to ask right now,” he said. “For parents who are not actively seeing out this knowledge [that provides a baseline from which to generate questions], I can’t imagine how overwhelmed they feel.”

Another parent felt confused about the low turn-out level at the meeting. She said she has talked to many parents about how they are interested in being involved in their child’s school, so there must be some conflicts at play. She said schools need to find alternative routes to contact and interact with parents who cannot attend afternoon or evening meetings that might conflict with their work schedule.

This parent also suggested the language barrier between schools and Spanish-speaking families might also be a reason for lower parental engagement. She said schools need to communicate with these families in Spanish and also notify them that MMSD schools provide interpreters for Spanish-speakers at meetings. 

The plan so far

MMSD has outlined its vision in a strategic framework along with priority areas, future steps to achieve them and metrics to monitor successes and failures.

The school district's strategic vision, available at: https://www.madison.k12.wi.us/files/Framework9-2-15.pdf

 The strategic framework outlines the qualities MMSD is working to instill in its students – everything from creativity, physical and mental wellness and self-knowledge to cultural competence and community connection.

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham believes full, genuine partnership with families is the only way to transform the school district into the ideal learning environment administrators, teachers and parents want it to be. 

“We’re working on not only making sure that every child is academically prepared by having mastery of content,” Superintendent Cheatham said, “but we want every child to…become the kind of well-rounded human beings that they need to be [to achieve success] in life.”

Involving parents in the process

This discussion at Leopold Elementary School was the first of several upcoming listening sessions at MMSD schools.

“All of these listening tour stops are helping us collect more information that we will be able to share [with] our school staff across the district,” Nichols said.

 Once the discussion circles at Leopold came to an end, Superintendent Cheatham identified some recurring themes – one being a lack of formality and consistency in communication with parents. Cheatham and Nichols intend to uncover more of these themes as the community conversations throughout MMSD continue.

Overall Nichols found the first meeting to be very informative and said it was a success. 

“It was a small group, but at the end of the day the size of the group is not what’s important,” Nichols said. “The focus is people sharing their true thoughts and experiences.”