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Parent Liaison Outperforms Under California's Immediate Intervention/Under Performing Schools Program (II/USP), Sanger High School, in Fresno County, California, developed a four-point action plan for restructuring the learning community in order to raise student achievement, meet growth targets, and exit the program. Their vision for improving student achievement included: English Language Arts (ELA) and reading intervention, professional development for ELA and math content standards, school climate, and parent involvement. To meet the goal of increasing parent involvement, Sanger High developed a position called Parent Community Liaison and hired bilingual Yolanda Barbosa to fill it and coordinate a Parent Center. The Parent Liaison provides parents with a variety of extensive services that promote effective communication and support student learning, as well as assist them with their own continuing education classes. As part of her job as parent liaison, Mrs. Barbosa runs two types of monthly meetings for parents: English Language Advisory Committee (ELAC) meetings and parent workshops called "Coffee Hours." To avoid a language barrier, all meetings and written communication are presented in English and Spanish. The parent workshops/Coffee Hours address academic topics and student issues such as attendance, dress code, gang awareness, discipline codes, drug abuse, teen pregnancy prevention, and teen depression. Since it's important for Mrs. Barbosa to meet every parent's needs, she is continuously working towards developing new parent involvement initiatives. For example, in September 2005 Mrs. Barbosa — with the help of the Senior Counselor, the Senior Advisor, and the University Project Advisor — organized the 2nd Annual Senior Parent Night. It was designed to help parents and students with all the questions regarding graduation requirements and planning for college. What would their students want to do when they graduated? And, more to the point, what would the students and their parents need to do over the course of their senior year to prepare? Topics of discussion included college options, the process of applying to college, various things students and families would need to do, and how to get money for college. The results of the parent liaison have been remarkable: during the 2004-2005 school year the average parent attendance at the ELAC meetings increased from three parents to a monthly average of sixty parents. In addition, almost one hundred parents attended the 2nd Annual Senior Parent Night, with the senior class having only 425 students enrolled. Parent involvement in the actual decision-making process at the school has improved and the parents are becoming a strong, active group in the community. When the administration considered moving Mrs. Barbosa's office to another building, they thought, "What would the parents think? We don't want to upset them." As Assistant Principal Ismael Hernandez stated, "Yolanda Barbosa, Sanger High School's Parent Liaison, is such a vital part of what we are doing at Sanger High, that we want to keep doing it. When the funding ran out at the end of last school year for the position, we found other funds to keep it here." Read SchoolsMovingUp’s full profile of Sanger High.
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