A retired teacher’s criticism

Thank you for your commentary. Efforts by schools to reach out to parents and make the teacher, the child's program and the school accessible to parents make all the difference in getting parents involved. I've always made it my business to be involved in my daughter's school. When she was in elementary school, I was intimately involved with many other parents, the teachers, staff and the principal in helping to ensure the school's budget was adequate and in helping make spending decisions. This Minneapolis public school made a great effort to keep parents informed about their academic program and even involved those of us with special knowledge (since I teach in the allied health field, I helped them with material when they were planning to teach anatomy). However, once my daughter moved to middle school (a Minneapolis public school considered one of the best in the district) I attempted to get involved and found the doors closed in my face. Sure, they wanted me to show up for "parent night" once a semester but the officially sanctioned parent group meetings were held in the middle of the day, making them unaccessible to many parents. To participate, you had to be elected by the other parents, who all seemed to know each other, live in the same neighborhood and who basically sneered at me when I came to that first meeting. I made one more attempt to become involved but after getting the same reaction, I stopped taking off of work to attend those unwelcoming meetings. That's not to say I didn't make efforts to work with my daughter's teachers at that school and some of those relationships were productive. Others, though, made no effort to communicate with me even when I reached out to them. It was such a change from being a true partner with my daughter's elementary school teachers. I can imagine that those teachers and parents sat in their meetings and bemoaned the lack of involvement by other parents without understanding their role in creating the situation.