June 2009

Proud to be a PIA

“Parent Insistently Advocating”

by Sue Katz Miller

As the year draws to a close, schools usually reward parents with mugs and luncheons and certificates to thank them for volunteering. This year, some parents felt they were also rewarded with a slap from the Board of Education for being too involved. At a school board meeting in May, board vice president Pat O’Neill insisted on the right of Principals to exclude “PIAs, the pain in the ass people” from the School Improvement Teams (SITs) composed of parents and staff in each school. Member Chris Barclay stated that “cooperative” and “respectful” parents may be more likely to get invited to the teams.

Feisty new member Laura Berthiaume stood up for PIAs: “If the team is composed of people who always say “yes,” and never say “no,” and never say “but,” then what you get unfortunately is a war in Iraq. It’s important that it not be an echo chamber, but that it be a community dialogue.” A video of the exchange (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OBYBxO-BAc) was posted by the Parents Coalition, a group of proud PIAs.

Barclay, a Takoma Park resident, continues to stand by his words, though he insists they were not meant to dissuade activist parents. “Folks who are on the team, need to be able to work on a team,” he reiterated. “But it doesn’t mean you give up your issue or put down your right to advocate.”

The truth is that many parents do not last long on the teams, and it’s not because they get kicked off. It takes patience and humility to sit through an SIT meeting—the jargon is thick, the rigid “improvement” template is dictated by Rockville, and the opportunities for feedback (no matter how respectful) are extremely limited. The problem as I see it lies not in keeping the PIAs off the team, but in finding an adequate number and diversity of parents to commit to staying on the team.

I am proud to call myself a PIA (Parent Insistently Advocating) and I am certainly not going to be cowed into ending my longtime campaign for two specific changes to the school improvement process:

• All School Improvement Plans should be available on school websites and distributed annually on paper (not just to the people who know they exist and get up the guts to go into the office and dare to ask for them).

• All SITs should include parent stakeholders from subgroups used in state and federal education policy, including African-American, Latino, gifted and talented, learning disabled, low-income, and English-language-learners. Putting a PIA from each of these groups on the team would ensure frank discussion, and real improvement.

The mystery of the lost key

I also plan to continue to be a real PIA advocating for more and better writing instruction. In May, the New York Times published a story about the need for students to take remedial courses in college to bring their writing (and other) skills up to snuff (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/education/28remedial.html). Just weeks earlier, our county schools released a massive campaign called “Seven Keys to College Readiness” (http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/info/keys/), complete with full-color brochures sent home to every student.

The complete absence of writing from the “Seven Keys” is confirmation that MCPS still does not understand parent dissatisfaction with the county’s writing program.

The Keys focus on math and reading, the two skills measured by mandated federal testing. Three of the Keys are benchmarks for math, two for reading. Ironically, the remaining two Keys state that students should pass an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exam, and that they should get a certain score on the SAT. Achieving either of these Keys requires strong writing skills. But how are students supposed to acquire those skills? It will not happen until we have an infusion of vocabulary, grammar, editing by teachers, creative writing, essay-writing and research paper assignments.

More boundary blues

A few local parents are honing their PIA skills to fight proposed boundary changes that would transfer their children to different schools than they are accustomed to. Among the six options under consideration are ones that move a section of North Takoma out of the Takoma Park Elementary zone and into East Silver Spring Elementary, and move neighborhoods out of East Silver Spring Elementary and into the Sligo Creek Elementary zone. Also, other students living in Takoma Park who now attend Sligo Creek Elementary would be reassigned to Takoma Park Elementary.

Parents who do not want their school zones changed have organized petitions, set up a blog (http://tpkboundaries.blogspot.com/), lobbied the Takoma Park city council to get involved, and threatened lawsuits. As always with boundary issues, race, class and property values are all coming into play.

“The first thing to do is call an emergency halt to the process,” says North Takoma’s Chuck Thomas, who has been going to boundary meetings armed with a videocamera. But Chris Barclay urges calm. “We’re way early in the process. The decision is not imminent, it doesn’t get made until next fall,” he says. “If one or two of the options are not viable, that’s the role of the committee to throw them out.”

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