A Course on Family Life
Ellen McCarthy
When a high school's population becomes more diverse, school systems may not realize that traditional curriculums fall short. At Mountain View School, a public alternative high school in Centreville, Virginia, we discovered that a crucial piece of curriculum was not reaching older English language learners only when students approached teachers they trusted with quandaries about relationships and sexual issues. Young women asked about sexually transmitted diseases, and one young man spoke of having three girlfriends, two of whom were pregnant. Our teachers felt unprepared to address these sensitive issues. Clearly, Fairfax County's Family Life Education curriculum, which covers sexual issues, wasn't meeting these students' needs.
Most Mountain View students are atypical high schoolers. Many of our youth are English language learners (ELLs) and more than two-thirds are 18 or older. Many have a history of academic or behavioral difficulties at previous schools. Others have health problems that interrupted their academic progress, are pregnant or already parenting, or work full-time to support themselves. We realized that we needed to find an alternative family life program for these students—not an easy thing to do in the current political climate.
As we assessed the situation, our first question was why students were missing the county's comprehensive family life program, which starts in elementary school and continues through high school, with various topics addressed in physical education, science, and social studies. Analyzing data on the school's ESOL students revealed the answers. Some students had arrived in the county school system only recently. Some had credits transferred from their home countries and were not required to take science and other classes in which these family life education units were embedded. Still others were not yet sufficiently proficient in English to be enrolled in the classes that addressed such topics. It might be several years before they would take the high school–level courses on sexuality.
When we reviewed the instructional materials that Fairfax County uses for family life in upper elementary through high school, we found them inappropriate for older students. Also, all materials were in English. Creating an entirely new curriculum seemed the only answer. The school met with Fairfax County's Family Life Curriculum specialists, who agreed to devise a new course.
First, we needed to gain the support of Fairfax County's instructional leadership and the Curriculum Advisory Council, a group that includes parents and community leaders and that approves or rejects any new curriculum dealing with family or sexuality. We had to prove a powerful need to get a green light for creating a curriculum in multiple languages, an expensive proposition. To make the case, we had to find out exactly what the students needed and how their course content should differ from that designed for younger students.
The county's ESOL director brought the issue to the Curriculum Advisory Council and the school board. To strengthen the case, we pointed out that two other alternative high schools and several programs for adults in Fairfax County could also benefit from the new curriculum.
While we waited for approval to develop the curriculum, Mountain View staff polled ELL students about their interest, and they responded enthusiastically. At an in-school session, speaking through translators, students helped develop a list of topics we might address in a minicourse on issues of family, relationships, and sexuality. Students too shy to speak about these topics wrote their questions on index cards, which were then translated. Students requested information about sexually transmitted diseases, abusive relationships and legal rights, contraception, pregnancy, and prenatal nutrition.
After months of work by curriculum developers and central office staff, we created a curriculum for a weeklong course. Both the school board and the Curriculum Advisory Council gave rapid approval.
Mountain View offered the new one-week family life curriculum as an option to all ELLs. Lessons took place mainly within English as a second language classes. Translators sat in on each session, with students grouped at tables by the languages they spoke. Teachers presented frequently asked questions and corresponding answers, translated into five languages, and students could ask clarifying questions on the spot.
We learned three lessons about garnering approval for new multilingual curriculums. First, research whether there is already an existing structure within the county that addresses the need or whether you need to create a program. Second, justify the cost of developing a program by providing data. Mountain View used data on students' ages, class enrollment, transcripts, and home language to show the county that our ELL students were not well served by the existing family life program. Third, involve students in the design of the new program. Mountain View students were our best resource in shaping this curriculum. They were the ones who knew how they would best learn and in what situations they would feel comfortable. They were the ones who knew what they didn't know.
Giving Parents Part of the PIE
Sandra R. Schecter, John Ippolito, and Karine Rashkovsky
Researchers focusing on language and literacy learning and community-based approaches to education maintain that a “parents as partners” approach helps overcome barriers to communication between teachers and parents in culturally diverse schools.
- Raise the achievement of immigrant, language-minority students through a community project for language and literacy learning.
- Familiarize immigrant parents with the Ontario education system and its expectations.
- Promote a climate that affirms diversity as a resource.
Students and their parents, teacher facilitators, school principals, and university-based researchers (who help design the curriculum) all participate in the program. Student volunteers from local high schools tutor the younger students at the two junior schools, helping them select reading material, access Web-based material, and use educational software. These older students often speak the home language of the youth they are tutoring.
Students and parents work in both mixed-age and age-specific settings. Typically, parents work with their children for one hour of the two-hour afterschool program. During the second hour, parents join in presentations and discussions on topics they have identified as important, such as parent-teacher interviews, homework, and the place of home language in a child's development.
During their time together, student and parent might read a book out loud together or try reading and writing activities modeled by a teacher. For example, a parent and child who both speak Tamil might read in counterpoint from a dual-language storybook, with the mother reading the introduction to a story in Tamil, the child reading the next part in Tamil or English, and so on until the story's end.
When students are not doing activities with their parents, they engage in cooperative-learning and drama activities, homework, sports, computer games, or reading and writing with their high school mentors or teachers. When adults and children work separately, we try to match thematic content. At Thornwood, for instance, parents contributed to the Ministry of Education's forthcoming character education curriculum by discussing the moral content and educative value of fables from their respective cultures, while students constructed storybooks that told and illustrated a favorite fable.
Interviews and surveys revealed that both parents and linguistic minority students changed their attitudes and behaviors after joining the PIE program. Parents reported—and demonstrated—higher levels of interaction with their children's teachers. They were more aware of, and made more inquiries about, specific learning tasks, and they initiated more communication with the school. Parents also spent more time reading and talking about books with their children and better understood how to help their children academically.
Both program teachers and students report seeing changes in students who participated in the program: increased self-confidence in interacting with peers and participating in class, keener interest in class activities, and less hesitation in asking for help. In the schools where the program has been running for at least two years, teachers and parents report differences in student receptivity to homework. Students who were reluctant to work with their parents at the beginning of the year now praise the value of working with them.
An independent study conducted by the collaborating school board found that at all three schools the grades of students who participated in the program were 10 to 15 percent higher than before their participation.
PIE helped parents from other cultures begin to see the value of the resources that they brought from their cultures of origin—especially being multilingual. School-based policies that evolved out of the project, such as support for use of students' home languages in literacy and numeracy activities, reinforced this view. We dare to envision such practices spreading throughout Canada's schools.
Confronting Racial Harassment
Valentine Hart
In March 2005, the student newspaper of Deering High School in Portland, Maine, contained an editorial by an angry 10th grader, Isai Galvez. Isai was upset by the graffiti on Deering's bathroom walls, graffiti like, “Go home, Mexicans” or “Go back to where you came from.” But he was more upset by the sign on the door: “Restroom Closed Due to Vandalism.” “Why can't the sign say ‘Restroom Closed Due to Racism?’” Galvez challenged. “Why can't . . . Deering High School admit the truth about racism and its role in school?”
Isai's plea for action did not go unheard. Kenneth Kunin had recently been named interim principal at Deering. He was already aware that racism and harassment were prevalent at Deering and was determined to confront stereotyping and the harassment following from it.
For decades, suburban Deering High had a predominantly white, English-speaking population. There has been a significant shift in the composition of its student population, with more immigrant families—speaking Somali, Spanish, Khmer, Vietnamese, French, and Arabic—enrolling. Five years ago, 15 percent of Deering students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, and about 10 percent of Deering students were linguistically diverse; by 2006, the percentage had doubled in both those categories. Unfortunately, being a minority at Deering was an uncomfortable, sometimes scary, situation.
In July 2005, Kunin met with Steve Wessler, director of the Portland-based Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, to devise a strategy for handling racist incidents. To take the pulse of the student population, they organized eight focus groups in October, including a total of 70 Deering students, asking for candor about what was being said and done within the school.
The results, assembled in a 22-page summary report, were shocking to some but no surprise to others. There was ample evidence of racial, sexual, antigay, and religious harassment. For example, students talked about “hearing ‘the Nword’ a lot,” and overhearing Somalian students being taunted and told to “take a shower.” Latino students recalled being called “burritos” or hearing remarks like, “Isn't it about low tide? Go get your family.”
According to Wessler, these types of harassment are likely to be found in many U.S. high schools. The difference at Deering was in how the administration responded. Kunin chose to circulate evidence of harassment openly within the community and to put primary responsibility for reform into the hands of Deering's students.
Throughout the late winter of 2006, Kunin strategized with Deering staff members on the manner and timing of publicly releasing the report. Kunin connected with such key stakeholders as the NAACP and ethnic minority communities. He brought a draft of the report, including his ideas for training students and faculty to take action against harassment, to his department heads and said, “This is what I'm intending to do. Help me think through how we're going to do it, but you can also tell me I'm crazy.”
In March, Kunin disseminated the report, first to Deering's student body, then to the entire school staff, and then to community members at an open meeting. Student leaders spoke at a press conference about their optimism regarding bringing enduring change to Deering. The following week, the business of preparing students to become aware of and stand against racial harassment began. Four hundred Deering students (one-third of the school population) volunteered for workshops on how harassment hurts and how they could help stop it. Many volunteers had been encouraged by teachers, who tried to identify natural and potential leaders, including students who held negative feelings about cultural differences and might have instigated harassment. Kunin and his immediate staff chose the final participants.
Two groups of 40 students each were trained through the Student Leader Project; each group participated in a daylong retreat involving informational talks, role-playing, and discussion. A smaller group of students participated in weekly 90-minute “controversial dialogue” sessions that were designed to break down barriers, build friendships, and develop a core of mutually supportive leaders. At the first dialogues, kids separated into “jocks over there, white girls here, Asian kids by the door,” as one student put it. But as the sessions, led by Wessler, progressed through the spring, barriers between students dissipated and students grew comfortable talking honestly and directly about tough issues.
These efforts have continued. As Wessler explains, “It's an issue of having a critical mass of people expressing a concern. If a student is willing to stand up and say ‘we don't talk like that here,’ that student can be sure to have two or three students support him. That's when change happens.”
A Full-Service School
Louis Cuglietto, Robert Burke, and Steven Ocasio
Poverty, family disruption, and difficulties with cultural assimilation make the process of educating children challenging. At John F. Kennedy (JFK) Magnet School for Math, Science, and Technology in Port Chester, New York, we have faced this challenge by recognizing students' physical and social needs. We respond to an urban, multicultural student population by providing proactive support to both students and their families.
Although neighboring towns are some of the wealthiest in the United States, Port Chester has high levels of poverty, unemployment, crime, and family instability. The area has been diverse for decades and has shifted from having a high number of African American families to serving a large population of Latino families. We have the highest percentage of Latino students and the lowest per capita income in Westchester County. Approximately 90 percent of our students receive free or reduced-price lunch, and 50 percent are English language learners. New York state considers JFK one of the state's highest-need schools, and we receive more federal Title I funding than most school districts in the state.
Thanks to federal, state, and local partnerships, JFK provides students with many academic enrichment programs, including an extended-day tutoring program in English language arts and mathematics for struggling students in grades 3–5.
One proactive strategy JFK has developed is our instructional support team. This team includes the school principal, school psychologist, social worker, speech teacher, reading teacher, special educator, and a regular classroom teacher (who is a permanent member).
Each week the support team meets to discuss students that teachers have recently identified as having academic, social, or behavioral problems. The classroom teacher of each student in question describes that student's issues, and team members agree on strategies and interventions. At a follow-up meeting about two months later, the classroom teacher responsible for each student returns to discuss whether the suggested interventions have been helping. This process enables JFK to be proactive when any teacher perceives that an individual student requires specific academic interventions.
In the 2005–2006 school year, we broadened our support team to include a nurse practitioner from Port Chester's Open Door Family Medical Center and a social worker from the Guidance Center Mental Health Services—two local facilities with which JFK has developed a partnership. Open Door has a satellite health center in our school building, and 90 percent of JFK's students (about 570 young people) are eligible for medical, nutritional, and mental health care at this center. A social worker from the Guidance Center also works within our school building.
Through these partnerships, our instructional team supports immediate action when health concerns affect student achievement, whereas in the past the process of seeking health care was slow and riddled with information gaps. Health workers bring pertinent data to our weekly team meetings. The social worker from the Guidance Center works with students and families facing the greatest challenges. By providing services in English and Spanish, he is able to find out and share key information on JFK students. Our highly experienced districtwide school social worker also points educators to resources.
Recently, a student with a mental illness began to exhibit disruptive behaviors in class. Our instructional support team reviewed the case and put in place a holistic plan that enabled our social worker to consult with all teachers involved with this student. Once teachers were aware of the student's mental health condition, they could identify aspects of their approach that might trigger the student's symptoms, and they modified their strategies as needed.
In recent years, New York State has named JFK a “Closing the Gap” school. In 2005–2006, 90 percent of JFK's 3rd graders, 95 percent of our 9th graders, and 85 percent of our 5th graders passed the state's standardized math assessment. One hundred percent of our 5th graders passed the state's social studies assessment, and 100 percent of our 4th graders passed the science assessment (only one grade level is tested in these subjects). Our partnership with community organizations like Open Door has enhanced the school's ability to reach out as a full-service school. JFK will continue to increase its positive influence on our students' achievement and their families' well-being.
