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North Middle School Demographics and History

I am currently teaching in a Title I school in Aurora, Colorado. We are a middle school

serving students grades six through eight with 76% of our population being English Language

Learners (ELLs) and 70% of our school’s population on a READ plan. We educate students that

speak thirteen different languages and their families sometimes speak even more (2022). The

district that I am in has had some boundary changes in the last 3 years which has resulted in

several school closures within our region. This has led to some uneasiness with staff and

families. We currently have a student engagement advocate and a family/parent liaison that work

in our building. Their goal is to communicate with families and ensure that students are regularly

attending school. Since the pandemic, their roles have not been the same. I will be working with

them to help create some of the resources for families that we are missing.

This is my fifth year at my school and my knowledge for parent supports is based on my

own experience as a teacher, grade level leader, as well as conversations with my mentor, the

assistant principal.

Parent Support for Classroom Instruction

My first year at North Middle School the only avenues for parent communication were

phone calls and emails. Over time, the parent liaison has implemented Language Link (a

translation phone service) and we purchased Talking Points (a translation texting service). This

has greatly supported our communication to families to help notify them of information coming

home. The information we send home typically consists of assessment reports. We send home

iReady diagnostic information, ACCESS test scores, and interim results. There is typically a

message that is sent home notifying the parents to ask their children for it. From there, we get

some parent contact, but not much.

A next step for using these channels of communication is to provide a guide to interpret

their child’s scores. I believe part of the reason we have such a low parent response rate from

these results is because they are difficult to understand. This guide could be attached to the score

reports or sent in an electronic form or even all of the above. A guide in layman’s terms would

support parents in asking questions and see where they need to be supporting their child if

possible. Once parents know how to see their child’s performance, we can work on compiling

lists of resources for parents to use at home. This might be directions to log on to iReady, other

supplemental websites to use at home, a list of the closest libraries, or after-school tutoring times.

Once families can see that their child does need some support at school, and have the resources,

there is a chance we could encourage communication and support from families.

Meetings, Conferences, and Activities

Currently, North Middle School hosts conferences two times a year, once in the fall and

again in the spring. This year, conferences began at 4:00PM and families had to enter the

building by 6:30PM in order to meet with a teacher. Furthermore, families could not come to

conferences without making an appointment. If they tried to walk in, they were given a contact

sheet with their child’s teacher’s information to email them later. The format of conferences is

not flexible to meet the needs of our working families, it also does not allow for the most

opportunities for parental involvement.

When it comes to building staff capacity during conferences, my grade level has created a

document that is filled out by the core content team. It has the students strengths, areas of

growth, and information about the resources that students can access at home. This document has

been presented to other grade levels, but I am unsure if it is being used anywhere else. A

document that houses this information is a great resource for new teachers to keep them focused

during conferences, as well as supportive of families so they don’t have to try and remember

every link and direction shared with them. This is the first year that my conference table has not

been full from the beginning of the evening until well past the planned end time. It was

incredibly disheartening to not feel as though I could connect with families like I have in years

past. A change that would be nice to see in future conferences is a document like the one my

grade level uses for all teachers, and more than one night of conferences with ample warning so

that families can participate.

Parent Volunteer Opportunities

At this time, we do not offer any opportunities for parents to come and volunteer in our

building. After speaking with my mentor, we are going to look at the calendar of events and see

if there are opportunities to invite them in. I would like to see about inviting parent volunteers for

our field day activities as well as eighth grade end of year events. There are many opportunities

in the month of May that would be made so much easier if we could get parents involved. One

instance of this would be an 8th grade formal to send off our students. The barriers that are

currently in place come down to chaperoning such a dance. If we could have equal teacher and

parent volunteers, then an event like that could help build more excitement around the end of

student’s eighth grade year. In my opinion, part of the reason there is so much disengagement by

the time students reach the eighth grade, is that there are very few opportunities to connect

families to the school.

School-Parent Compact

Currently, there is no school-parent compact in my building. After looking at the district

website, it appears that most elementary schools have their compact posted on their website for

families to view. It appears that many of these compacts contain phrases beginning with

“Parents and Guardians will… Students will… Staff will…” (2022) Then following are the

agreements set forth by the families and school. I believe this would be an excellent document to

create. Not only would it help families feel valued in decision making, but it would help staff feel

supported by families. I am talking with my mentor and family liaison to see how we can create

this before the 2023-2024 school year.

Parental Involvement in Decision Making

It feels as though we have very little parental involvement from the teacher perspective.

Most of the time, we are contacting and hoping to bring in families for negative circumstances

and just calling or texting families with positive information. Considering this, it is not much of a

surprise that families don’t feel entirely welcomed into our building. When we need to make

decisions and hope for input from families, we hold "parent coffees”. These events usually occur

sometime during the week midmorning. The information is presented in both English and

Spanish to support our Spanish speaking population, but no other interpretation is provided. On

average we have 12 to 15 parents attending at a time, which does not translate to much parent

input from a middle school.

Moving forward, I would be interested to see if moving parent coffees to a Saturday

morning or 5:00PM event would change the attendance outcomes. We could even allow for more

opportunities to provide families with interpretation and partner with the New American

Welcome Center to reach out to families connected with them and encourage their participation

in the decision making process as well.

Parent Resources

Aurora Public Schools, as a district, has seen a disturbing increase in drug use in our

student body. Specifically opiates and fentanyl use. As a resource, the district held a fentanyl

awareness event in our building for families on a Saturday in the fall. We had about 20 families

attend with many members of the community being there to support in solidarity. This was a

resource that was broadcasted on our website, the news, and it went out on an auto-dialer to

every family. We also provide families with information on parenting classes that are provided to

immigrant families through the New American Welcome Center located in Aurora,Colorado. We

have a partnership with them to support our refugee families and they also provide translation

services for us.

Moving forward, I would like to expand our resources to help students and families get

food and clothing if they need it. I have spoken to administration on several occasions about how

we could possibly install a laundry unit somewhere in our building to help students that need to

wash their clothes. So far, we have not found an area other than the kitchen that would have the

necessary hookups. That would be a next step, there are also plans to build a new 6-12 building

on our campus, so a laundry room recommendation would be a next step in those plans.

Parent Interest Survey

By the time I leave for Winter Break, my goal is to work with my mentor and family

liaison to create a parent-interest survey. The idea is we can send it out at the beginning of the

new semester and see how much feedback we receive. Then, we will also have parents complete

it next fall as they check their child in for school. By the fall, I hope to have it translated into as

many languages as we have in our building to provide better access.

Linguistically Diverse Supports

North has a strong team of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) educators. There

are four teachers on the team and one of the members of the administration team is a former

CLD teacher. When planning events, the needs of these families is considered due to the high

number of ELLs in our building and due to the influence of the CLD team. The suggestion for

making it more welcoming for all families would be a tough climate change for our building. The

majority of our ELLs speak Spanish. However, we are receiving a large volume of refugees from

Africa and Malaysia as well. With this increasing population, it is isolating to have almost

everything offered in only English and Spanish. Many teachers also speak Spanish in varying

proficiencies and will teach their Spanish speaking students in Spanish as well. The district

policy for educating ELLs is that students should be fully immersed in English Language

teaching, and supports can be provided in their first language. So, ensuring we are providing

equitable education while also being respectful of their cultural legacies and linguistic skills, we

need to include our other languages as well (Schnetter, 2022). This may look like planning

events and creating flyers early enough to send them to our translation services and getting them

written in Spanish, English, Karen, Burmese, Dari, Arabic, Amharic, and Somali.

I say that it will be a difficult climate change, because teachers at North have catered to

our English and Spanish populations for the last 5 years. The CLD team has spent many sessions

brainstorming ways to ask teachers to break the habit without being accusatory. So far, very little

progress has been made with some teachers. Others, have began to come to the CLD team to ask

advice to engage all students in their classrooms, which has been a point of celebration.

References

Google. (2022). Altura compact.docx (2).PDF. Altura Compact. Retrieved November 19, 2022,

from https://drive.google.com/ le/d/1bg7tMb01sQKc1rcnG4j9DW6uUX-EtQgN/view

North Middle School. (2022). Retrieved November 19, 2022, from https://north.aurorak12.org/

home

Schnetter, M. (2022). Culturally & linguistically diverse education. Culturally & Linguistically

Diverse Education. Retrieved November 19, 2022, from https://clde.aurorak12.org/

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