It wasn’t always that way!


Breaking the

Barrier of Distrust

During my first years as principal of Independence Elementary School in the late 1960s, I encountered an invisible curtain of distrust drawn between segments of the parent body and the staff. Certainly there were parents who supported their children’s teachers and welcomedme as their new principal. There were many—the extremely welcoming and positive PTO board, devoted library volunteers, and many other moms and dads who communicated their interest in contributing to the welfare of the school.

However, a great number of parents distanced themselves from the school only to attend twice yearly parent-teacher conferences or to telephone the teacher or principal regarding a school problem their child might be experiencing.

During its brief six year history, it appeared that the administrators of Independence School felt that it was solely the school’s job to educate the children, and signaled to the parents that they needn’t be involved with nor interfere in the business of the school. Once this dysfunctional relationship between home and school became clear to me, I knew I had an unexpected challenge ahead of me—to find ways of breaking down the barrier of distrust while building a close home-school partnership.

Even as I type this almost 40 years later, I feel pangs in my stomach thinking about the hostility and anger generated by a dozen or so parents with an intense and extreme distrust of the school. They lashed out at their children’s school in a variety of ways—bad mouthing teachers, criticizing school discipline and attacking the curriculum whenever and wherever they could, in an effort to enlist support of other parents in their private battle against the school.

So I embarked on a campaign to point out to teachers and parents alike the necessity of building a true home-school partnership for the benefit of every single child. At first, some teachers were reluctant to be more open to parents, either through lack of experience or because of having been “burned” once too often by parents with very abrasive demands or with an axe to grind. I reassured teachers I would totally support them as long as they respected each child’s individual needs as a learner and as a person. RESPECT of individual children, staff members and parents was to be the foundation of our relationships, our educational programs, and our future as we worked together forging a school community.

I sent an unmistakable message to the parent body that their new principal intended to open channels of communication and to foster positive relations with the school community. Children needed to feel the security of the rapport between school and home, rather than to be confused by an undercurrent of tension between teachers and parents.

I spoke at our September general PTO meeting, at grade level open houses, and at neighborhood coffee evenings graciously hosted by different families. To facilitate and simplify communications between parents and teachers, we encouraged parents to drop in or to telephone teachers 20 minutes before or after the school day. A Friday Bulletin was inaugurated to keep families informed about school events, policies and special classroom programs. A few of the younger teachers began sending home marvelous weekly classroom newsletters (pre personal computer,pre EdGate/SchoolNotes.Com.)

From the first days, weeks, months and years, the PTO presidents and the many committee chairpersons and volunteers actively supported the school in a host of ways. Most importantly, they were advocates of the school who paved the way for closer communications between parents and the school. Whether it was welcoming new families to the school community or supporting teachers through mini-grants for special classroom projects; bringing Artists-in-Residence to work directly with classes and small groups of children or buying new equipment for the school, these and other activities, such as the yearly spring Fun Fair, all contributed towards improving home-school relations and ultimately helped the school to become amore positive learning environment.

I sat in on as many parent-teacher conferences as possible to become better acquainted with the children, their parents and teachers. By the end of the second year I was quite well acquainted with almost every child from the 1st grade and above. While visiting classrooms, I observed the quality of the children’s learning and spotted those children who might be lagging behind, those needing more of a challenge, and those experiencing some sort of difficulty. Moreover, I reassured both the children and their teachers that they had not only a principal in the school office but also a friend who cared about them and who would be fair in helping them solve school problems.

My basic message to parents was that our doors were open; any concern related to their child’s education was also a concern of ours. We encouraged parents to contact us and we reassured them we would keep them abreast of what was going on with their children. (Nothing is more rightly infuriating to a parent than finding out thata problem has existed for a long a period of time without their knowledge. “Why didn’t you tell us before, we could have done something about it if we had only known!”)

Furthermore, I tried to convey my very strong conviction that parents know their children better than anyone else and therefore parents needed to play a vital role in assisting the school in educating their children. Most parents accepted what we were trying to communicate at face value, while some wondered whether these “words” were just more educational jargon. Here and there a parent or two remained trapped in past battles with the school (or with themselves) and simply refused to accept our invitation to participate in the life of their child’s school.

In response to a parental survey, it became clear that a large number of parents wanted to see more of the “paperwork” children were doing in math, reading, composition and so on. Most teachers kept folders of children’s papers as ONE means of tracking progress. In response, I decided unilaterally that teachers would send home monthly portfolios of children’s work for parents to review. As this was quite time consuming and cumbersome, the following year we limited it to the months when there were no parent conferences, and finally this practice was dropped when parents, teachers and I realized it was more productive to communicate with one another as needed and to share children’s written work less formally and more spontaneously—in forms such as class booklets, student diaries, classroom presentations … I never ceased to be amazed at the myriad ways teachers were able to creatively share the work of their students.

Recognizing that the school program needed to become more transparent, we invited parents to spend a morning with their child in the classroom. Most parents were unable to do so because of work schedules or other time commitments; however, those that did come in generally left with a more positive attitude towards the educational program and a heightened respect for their children’s teachers. Teachers began to feel less intimidated by parents in the classroom, and parents began to understand that an open door policy was just that, neither hollow words nor a public relations strategy.

By my third or fourth year at school, as teachers and parents got to better know one another, and many were now even on a first name basis, parents were being welcomed into classrooms as volunteers to assist teachers, especially in the lower grades. The school was no longer under a siege mentality and teachers sensed the support of the school community.

Excerpted from:
Teaching as an Act of Love: Thoughts and Recollections
of a Former Teacher, Principal and Kid
© 2007 Richard Lakin