Having spent five years at PPS as a parent and now as a concerned resident/watchdog/blogger (whatever you want to call me), what I have witnessed so far is a lack of consistency on how schools communicate with their parents. I rarely hear of a school communicating with its surrounding community but it does happen here and there.
I have no knowledge if the district has official and written district-wide guidelines on how to communicate, or what needs to be communicated, to parents and community, but communication to parents here in Plainfield is a fragile item that can easily be broken by a school that lacks strong leadership, or worst, by a school that is trying to do too much with fewer and fewer tools. Sure, fliers might go out, and maybe Global Connect (recorded phone messages) is used for parents on regular basis at some schools, but most of the time what I have seen fliers for is for events or mandated information that the school or the district must send to parents, same for Global Connect. So, I pose the next two questions?
Shouldn't communication with parents and community include the effort to help us all understand the issues the district and students face?
Or are parents and community mostly viewed as passive recipients of information?
I hope you think about these two questions.
I close this post with the following quote from Dr. Maurice Elias and which I thought is quite pertinent when it comes to our school district, parental-community involvement and students' failure here in Plainfield:
Caring emerges from relationships in which people are given the time and space to understand deeply what they are doing and why it matters."
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