[Winona] site teams

[Laurie Rogers / Jeff Bernardy]

Steve Kranz asked me to comment about my experiences on site team at Dakota school. I was a member 5 years ago for a couple of years, and then again last year, serving as parent facilitator. The meeting time was during staff lunch break, and then last year was moved to 7:30 a.m. to try and accommodate for more parents.  In both cases, the times were difficult for working parents and community members.  We did maintain 3 to 4 parent/community members, and usually they represented 50% or more of the participants at meetings (commonly 5 to 7 people total).  The site team was very welcoming to parents. However, most of the creative energy for our sci-math/environmental focus projects came from PTA, where 15 to 20 parents in addition to staff came together and collaborated with fewer time restrictions and a more open agenda.  Site team consisted of some of the same people, being such a small school.  So, there was always support from site team for ideas generated by the school community in other settings, but the PTA was typically the place where ideas were born.  To me, site team felt like more of a “housekeeping” decision body, and therefore it didn’t feel quite as creative to me.  But we did make some good nuts and bolts decisions and formulated plans of action that led to improvements of the physical environment and safety of our school.   I think what I appreciated the most at Dakota’s site team was its constant effort to recruit and include parents.  It was not just another staff meeting.  Making that work was not easy with so many working families.  The expertise of non-staff members on the team was listened to and utilized consistently.  For example, one parent with a strong planning/engineering background was extremely helpful to our discussion and eventual plan to solve a moisture problem in the school.  The varied experience of team members was valued.  The culture was one that believed parents needed to be equal team members, and that a parent should hold the facilitator role.  I think Dakota’s site team got that part right.  However, I can see that in a larger school and on a larger site team, it might become harder to maintain that parent/staff ratio (50-50). I do think that parents need to be actively recruited for these kinds of roles. I’ve come to believe that most people need to be asked directly to do something before they’ll consider getting involved.  If people know they are needed or wanted, they often step up to the plate.  If we really want parents involved in site teams, I think we need to call them up and request their service AND commit to meeting times that work for more of them.  I believe the effort would be worth it for our school system.                                                                                Laurie Rogers