San Benito High School has a barrier to break between students’ academic and home lives, and administrators are taking another proactive step toward doing just that.
The latest tool to engage parents regarding their kids’ school lives is a Parent Partnership Forum being held at 7 p.m. Monday at the high school’s library. The point of the forum is to foster smoother, more accessible communication between parents and educators.
We encourage parents to attend this gathering, especially those who have any sense of uncertainty about the grasp they hold on their child’s education.
At the forum, parents can learn best ways to reach teachers; they’ll hear about research on parent and school partnerships; and there will be discussion in general on how they can develop better communication.
“I’m a firm believe that parents need to be more involved now than ever,” high school Principal Krystal Lomanto told Free Lance reporter Alice Joy.
She’s absolutely right. Parents do need to be more involved and they must take more responsibility for steering their children in the right direction, especially considering a high school climate in which the student population and class sizes create a less than ideal learning environment.
Then high school-age kids have other pressures – peer pressure to use and abuse substances, social pressure to hang with the wrong crowds or join a gang – which, unheeded by watchful, responsible parenting, also stand to vastly affect students’ academic performance.
So it’s crucial that parents have the best understanding possible of their kids’ academics, and communicating with the school – whether it’s directly with teachers and administrators or through various, other technological means – is the sensible way to accomplish that.
The high school has rolled out some bold initiatives in recent years to better communicate with parents – about which parents can learn if they attend Monday’s forum.
The In-Touch system, for one, allows parents access to kids’ report card and attendance information on the school Web site. The high school also now has a useful phone system that immediately informs parents when their kids miss classes.
These are positive steps toward getting parents more involved, and the forum serves as a means to promote these opportunities as ways to reach a goal on which every rationale citizen agrees – improving the educational structure as a whole and giving every student a reasonable chance to succeed.
