PSC-ED-OELA

Moderator: Francisco Lopez

08-27-15/1:00 pm CT

Confirmation # 4932024

Page 1

White House Task Force on New Americans

Webinar #3 – Engaging Immigrant Parents and Families Transcript

PRESENTATIONS

PSC-ED-OELA

Moderator: Francisco Lopez

August 27, 2015

1:00 pm CT

Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants will be on a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session time. At that time, to ask a question, please press star 1 on your phone and record your name at the prompt.

This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Mr. Sam Lopez. Sir, you may begin.

Samuel Lopez: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and good morning to those on the West Coast. Welcome to our Webinar on Engaging Immigrant Parents, Families and Concerned Adults, the third Webinar in our series on educational and linguistic integration of immigrants and refugees.

This Webinar series is part of the US Department of Education’s work with the White House task force on new Americans.

As I stated, our topic is engaging immigrant parents, families and concerned adults and we invite you to submit questions through the chat box as you listen as we will be synthesizing those and asking them of our panelists at the end of the Webinar.

Hi. My name is Samuel Lopez and I serve as the team leader for the National Professional Development Grants Division with the Office of English Language Acquisition here at the US Department of Education.

Our panelists today include Carrie Jasper, Laura Gardner and David Valladolid. Please allow me to share a brief bio on each of them.

Carrie Jasper is the director of outreach to parents and families in the Office of Communications and Outreach at the US Department of Education. She is also the writer and editor of the monthly newsletter for military families “Touching Base” and the editor of “Family School and Community Engagement,” a monthly newsletter for parents and families.

Carrie is the former teacher of the DC public schools and the archdiocese of Washington. She holds a master’s in Math Education from Howard University and a bachelor’s from the District of Columbia, Teachers College.

Our second panelist, Laura Gardner, has worked in the refugee resettlement field for over ten years which included working with bridging refugee youth and children services as their education specialist. Currently, she coordinates immigrant parent involvement as the ELL family and community outreach manager for the Anne Arundel County Public Schools, Office of School and Family Partnerships in Annapolis, Maryland. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Education and a master’s in Social Work from Columbia University.

And finally, our third panelist, David Valladolid, is the national president and CEO of the Parent Institute for Quality Education. In addition, some of his appointments include the governor’s appointee for the Reading and Literature Project Advisory Board. Also, appointed to the San Diego Community College Trustee Advisory Committee and with the American STEM Alliance.

Mr. Valladolid is a graduate of San Francisco University. I’m sorry, San Diego State University. He is a Vietnam combat veteran who was wounded twice and thus recipient of the Purple Heart. So thank you, everyone, for joining us. And now we’re ready to begin. So we turn to our first panelist, Carrie Jasper.

Carrie Jasper: Good afternoon and thank you, Mr. Samuel Lopez, and thank you for this opportunity, (Olivia Gill) and Marianna Vinson. In June of this year at the National PTA Conference, Secretary Duncan spoke of Dr. (Anthony Blake) who conducted a 15-year study across hundreds of elementary schools in Chicago.

The study was conducted to try to distinguish why some schools were able to improve and others were not. What Dr. (Blake) found was that five organizational features of a school, regardless of where it is or what type of children it serves, will determine whether or not learning can thrive.

The five organizational features are a clear vision for instruction, a staff with the capacity to see that vision through, a student-centered learning environment, skilled leadership, and active and engaged parents.

The study also revealed that it is imperative that all five be done together. In fact, schools that did all five well were ten times more likely to improve than schools that didn’t. This research clearly shows that no matter what a family’s income or social economic background, family engagement and education is essential for student success.

From the research, we know the importance of engaging families and communities but how do we get there?

In an effort to develop a framework from which to work, the US Department of Education called upon experts, researchers, practitioners, those in the field and staff. From this brief overview, you see the timeline of the development and release of the US Department of Education’s family and community engagement framework.

The framework was developed to be a guide for the state, district and local school districts from which to work. It is a timely - it is timely because our neighborhoods and schools have changed. Our country now reflects the faces, languages and customs of several countries.

With one and four young children in the United States living in an immigrant family, efforts to build trust and establish meaningful two-way communication with the families is an urgent priority. It’s system expansion efforts to realize their purpose.

The framework stresses working with educators, families and communities. There are four components of the framework, the challenge, opportunity conditions, policy and program goals, family and staff capacity outcome.

This is just a brief overview of the four components. The challenge addresses the problems that schools and families face when striving to partner.

Educators have a strong desire to work with families from diverse background and cultures and to develop stronger home-school partnerships of shared responsibility with children’s outcomes but they do not know how to accomplish this.

Immigrant and refugee families wish to be more active but still inadequate. There are significant barriers that immigrant and refugee parents face as they try to engage with their children’s educational experiences. They face barriers of limited English proficiency and knowing how to navigate the system, as well as negative experiences with schools that lead to distrust of feeling unwelcomed.

The next component is opportunity conditions. Opportunities must be tailored based on the need. There are two types of opportunity conditions: The process conditions and organizational conditions. This is - the process condition is the condition that requires series of actions to take place. There are five.

The five are link to learning, which aligns that with the school and district goals; relational, building respect and trust; development, starting with the families and schools where they are versus service orientation; collaboration, learning as a group; and interactive, testing and applying what’s been discovered. And in these opportunity conditions, always start with the relational to build trust.

The organizational conditions are that which refers to the infrastructure, being able to weave the concept of family and community engagement into every aspect of the system, making it systemic, integrated and sustained.

The third component is policy and program goals. The goals of policy and programming are directed in improving family engagement efforts, focused on building the capacity of staff, immigrant and refugee families and communities to engage in partnership. This is broken down into four Cs: Capabilities, which refers to the skills and knowledge that everyone brings to the table; connection, what networks do they have; confidence, what’s their self-worth; and cognition, examining our own beliefs and values.

And the fourth component, family and staff capacity outcome. Once staff and families have built that requisite to take capabilities, connections, confidence and cognition, they will be able to engage in partnerships that will support student achievement and student learning.

There is a good example, Santa Clara County, of how all four components are applied in Partners in Education, a resource on Ed’s Web site.

Here’s a list of additional resources that are available on Ed’s Web site around the framework. Of course, the diagram and a brief narrative of what the framework is about, Partners in Education, a publication of the Southeast Comprehensive Center of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

Partners in Education provides a more comprehensive explanation of the framework with examples. It’s in the document that you’ll find Santa Clara County. And also a list of frequently asked questions around the framework. At the Web site, you will also find a map that will identify the technical assistance vendors around the country and also state family engagement Web sites that will provide additional resources.

In addition to the framework, the department has created a family and community engagement team that is representative from several offices across the department, all working together to engage families, schools and community.

The Office of Communication and Outreach have ten regional offices that have family engagement specialist in each office. The specialist has held forums, workshops, listen-and-learn sessions, spoken at conferences and meeting. The department has also collaborated and partnered with agency, state, districts and organization.

We also want to share some additional resources from the department if you were to engage immigrant parent, families and concerned adults. In January 2015, the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice released joint guidance reminding states and districts of their obligation to EL students and LEP parents.

Included in the guidance is information related to supporting parents with limited English proficiency.

In conjunction with the guidance, OCR and DOJ also created two fact sheets. One of those fact sheets specifically outlines what schools and districts must do to communicate with parents or guardians who do not speak, read or write English proficiently. We encourage you to explore these resources and share them with your communities.

There’s also a notice of language assistance that’s available on our Web site and it offers assistance in six languages, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic.

You can also have language assistance in more than 170 languages when you call the information resource center at the 1-800 number listed on this slide.

The Office of Civil Rights offers documents in 19 different languages. And also Ed highlights states, districts and schools that demonstrate effective practices such as what David and Laura are doing right now.

On that note, I’m privileged to introduce our next presenter, Laura Gardner.

Laura Gardner: Thank you so much for this opportunity to speak on this Webinar today. So I’m Laura Gardner and I coordinate immigrant parent involvement for Anne Arundel County Public Schools.

You can go to the next slide, please.

So in Anne Arundel County Public Schools, we’re located in Annapolis, Maryland. We also include the suburbs of DC, some of the suburbs of Baltimore and essentially have urban, rural and suburban areas within our county. There are about 80,000 students and 125 schools in our district. And according to the census, about 11% of children in the county speak a language other than English at home, so essentially immigrants or children of immigrants.

This growth in immigrants has primarily happened over the past ten years. So these populations are still very new to the community and new to our schools.

Our top languages for those who are interested are Spanish, by far is number one and many thousands, but then after that, we have a few hundred Urdu, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean speakers as well as smaller amounts of many other languages.

So I work in the Office of School and Family Partnerships and, as I mentioned, I coordinate our outreach to immigrant families and communities and our office provides three different types of support.

The first one being staff and programs for immigrant parents to help them support their children in school. For staff, I oversee 18 bilingual facilitators, which, in our district, that basically means their interpreters plus parent liaisons kind of rolled into one and we support about nine languages, I believe. And programs that we have for immigrant parents we offer many programs. And in the following slides, I’m going to talk about one of them.

In addition, we also have school and community partnerships to support immigrant families. And then third, we offer a lot of professional development, training and support to staff to work with their growing diverse population because, as I mentioned, our immigrant population is very new in our county, just really over the past ten years, and people often need a lot of support to work with the community.

You can go ahead to the next.

So when we’re thinking about our programs for immigrant parents, we really turn to this model of immigrant parent involvement that was created by Young-Chan Han, who is a family involvement specialist in the Maryland Department of Education.

In this model, as you’ll see, you’ve got the pyramid and you’ve got the survivors at the beginning. Now as an immigrant parent is in sort of survival mode, this might be somebody who’s new to the country who’s really focused on their basic survival needs. They will try to enroll their children, you know, in school but they may need a lot of assistance in doing so. They need the help of interpreters or, in our school district, the bilingual facilitators and they just generally don’t yet know how to navigate the school system.