Healthy School-Home Connection, U&I-RISE’s newest offering, is a staff training and parent orientation that strengthens the School-Home relationship by fostering Understanding and Solidarity among parents and teachers. The newly-created foundation of mutual support and shared accountability produces “same team” thinking and empowers us adults to provide the needed environment for our children/students to:
Know their purpose for going to school
- Cooperate with their learning
- Support and cooperate with their fellow students
- Make the academic strides in Reading and Math that close the Opportunity Gap (the academic disparity between Black students and other groups, formerly called the Achievement Gap).
The course content covers
- The definition of Education
- Who all educates; why everybody says “it begins at home”
- School’s and Home’s responsibilities to the Home-School Relationship (Home has 1 responsibility)
- What is needed to prepare any a child to succeed in school
- How to prepare any children to succeed in school.
What Healthy School-Home Connection Does
Healthy School-Home Connection creates Understanding and Solidarity between parents and teachers.
- Understanding – The Home-School Connection course (Part 1) creates shared language between parents and teachers about their relationship and responsibilities to their children/students and the school community. This shared language makes it easier to communicate, agree, and work together to identify and solve problems
- Solidarity – The in-person experience (commonly part of Orientation, Open House, etc. at the beginning of the school year, but can happen at any point) builds cohesion and trust between the Emotional (Parenting) relationship and the Professional (Teaching) aspects of student learning by:
- Putting faces with names among the adults,
- Setting goals together, and
- Agreeing on what their own, and each other’s, responsibilities are toward meeting their agreed-upon goals.
As the school year progresses, problems that inevitably arise are recognized as “bumps on the road” and are handled in ways that strengthen the parent-teacher relationship. Students can’t help but excel because the adults that work closest with them agree on the conditions children need to succeed, and parents and teachers are working together to provide it – no excuses.
