School Climate Group Stresses Engagement, Funding

Among other topics, the task force talked about the importance of engagement in Monday’s meeting. (Photo by Chinnapong/Adobe Stock)

As Delaware students head back to school, a state task force dedicated to keeping their environment positive had a major focus on family engagement and funding.

The 24-member Student Behavior and School Climate Task Force, made of government and educational officials as well as school behavioral specialists and resource officers, first heard a presentation from Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter School Network.

She said there’s this belief that if only families are engaged, all behavioral problems would be fixed.

“But family engagement, family involvement, family support, looks different for every school, community, every family,” she said. “Every educator in this room and on Zoom knows that we meet our students where they are, and so we do the same thing with our families, we meet our families where they are. We don’t know what’s going on in our family’s home life and their work life, what that dynamic looks like at home, so we can’t just expect that family engagement is going to fix it all.”

Relationship-building is the real key to a healthy school climate, she said.

Eight of the state’s 24 charter schools work with a group called ParentCamp, which helps build a family, community and school engagement model.

“They help facilitate those conversations, and actually, leaders are not allowed, the school leaders are not allowed to lead the conversation,” Massett said. “The teachers and educators in the room aren’t allowed. It’s led by parents.

Other charters, she said, support family life while helping students learn life skills. She cited First State Montessori Academy, and how they teach children how to sweep the floors, do the dishes, take out the trash and other practical skills to help foster a sense of responsibility in the home and community.

Some schools are partners with the Community Education Building in Wilmington, which has counseling as well as a family resource center that has help for career, food, housing and benefits.

While charters aren’t perfect, there hasn’t been nearly the uproar of parents complaining about school safety, bullying, fights and other incidents like there have been with district schools.

Massett said relationships are king, and cited some strong leaders like Aaron Bass of EastSide Charter.

He values relationships to a prime degree – for example, just some of what he’s done to build a safe space that is welcoming included a partnership to buy gifts from the Amazon wish lists of all teachers so they don’t have to buy materials out-of-pocket, as well as the school’s annual Suit up, Show up event where students dress to the nines the first day of school with a huge crowd of school and community members cheering them into the building.

As the task force prepares to start drafting recommendations that it must submit to the state by November, Massett says she challenges them to ensure none of the recommendations take away or limit the ability to build relationships with all the stakeholders involved in a school system.

There were concerns brought up that sometimes engagement can be hard when parents send their children all over the state, one to a charter, another to a high school outside their district and so forth.

Massett, who is a self-proclaimed big supporter of school choice, said it really starts with building a community within the actual school.

Others mentioned breaking down barriers to having parental involvement, like the fact that parent volunteers have to get a background check every single year, which takes time and money, while teachers only have to do it once before getting hired.

Massett pointed out that EastSide funds an app called ParentSquare that allows teachers and parents to communicate throughout the day.

“You can’t put 25 hours in a 24 hour day, and that’s the problem,” said Sen. Eric Buckson, R-Dover. “You’re asking [teachers] to excel at teaching a child math, while at the same time excelling at being the disciplinarian, the attendance monitor, the school counselor, and you’re asking to do it for a 28-kid system.”

He said he understands relationships are valuable, and he said teachers that might send misbehaving students out of the classroom value relationships just as much, but they have tried everything they can and it’s not working, and they need folks outside the classroom to deal with the child so they can get back to focusing on the dozens of students who aren’t disrupting learning.

There were later brief comments about funding to support the third tier of the multi-tiered system of supports, referred to as MTSS, which addresses both the academic and nonacademic – behavioral, social and emotional – needs of the whole child as a way to boost student performance.

After initial enrichment supports like before, after and summer school, Tier I includes universal interventions for all types of students, bullying prevention, substance use prevention, health education, suicide prevention, personal body safety and more.

Tier II are more targeted supports, like small group counseling, mental health screenings and more.

Tier III is the most intense and can include individual counseling, crisis response, monitoring and more. This is the level where schools would refer struggling students to external services, like a psychologist, for example.

Buckson said properly funding and utilizing the third tier is a must coming out of this task force.

The group is expected to draft recommendations in its coming meetings.

Its next meeting is Sept. 16 at 4 p.m. Watch it here.

School climate group stresses engagement, funding

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