Engaging a Turnaround School: Dispatch #1

I've got my workplan, I've got my action steps.  Today the rubber met the road: I conducted my first "one-on-one" with a staff member of the turnaround elementary school in Chicago--let's call it Edwards Elementary--I'm working with this summer.  The topic is community engagement.

I've made the case to myself--and am trying to make it to my office team--that the best thing I can do is build and support relationships about community engagement, relationships that can far outlast my brief tenure as a summer consultant.  As a professor of mine said last semester, "People are more likely to support something they helped to build."  I'm trying to help them to build it.


I escaped from the 103-degree heat into a Starbucks on the far south side of the city to meet with the Edwards's newest clerk, Eileen.  I'd first connected with her at a school meet-and-greet the week before.  I asked her to tell me a bit about herself, and I learned that she grew up in the neighborhood of the school, still lives there, and went to the school herself some 15, 18 years ago.  That was all news to me.

Part of her story, then, was this: "I want Edwards to be the place it was, the place people came to for school from all over the city.  I want it to be the place, again."

Another part was the views on parent engagement she's developed in her previous job as the clerk at another turnaround school on the (somewhat less far) south side.  She was eager to open up about her experiences, and had some definite feelings about what works and doesn't work when it comes to connecting with families.  

If she could recommend only one or two key things to teachers at Edwards, what would they be?  Her eyes lit up: You've got to connect, she said, one way or another.  Email, text, phone calls.

At your old school, I asked her, what did staff do to reach out to families who didn't have a working phone or email?  Her face lit up: Oh--we'd get the security guard who'd lived in the neighborhood for 50 years, and he'd either find someone who could get to them, or he'd go knock on their door.

Just the first of many one-on-ones.  Should be an interesting summer.