Email Message from Crissina Johnson

Here's an email Crissina sent out, she said I could post it here; thanks, Crissina!

Greetings and good Sunday afternoon.

The past few weeks have been quite intense, to say the least, for all of us. As we begin to turn our hearts and minds toward the coming school year, there are a number of concerns I would like us to work together toward resolving within the next few weeks.

As you know, the mission and passion of my heart is to see all parents (when possible) engaged, informed and actively involved on the campuses where their children attend school. According to The Impact of Parental Involvement, Parental Support and Family Education on Pupil Achievements and Adjustment: A Literature Review by Professor Charles Desforges research report RR433, A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family and Community Connections on Student Achievement [a review of recent research published by the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (2002)] and the eloquent comments of Dr. Lewis King Ph.D. who recently addressed a small group of parents and administrators at Westchester High School, high student achievement is directly linked to high levels of parent involvement.

With this being said, there are three area I sincerely hope we can work together to 'reform' (change) between now and August as it relates to the LMUFoS:

1: ALL parents be required to attend a "Parent Orientation" prior to the first day of school with additional opportunities being made available throughout the school year. An orientation which details the school's Parent Compact, the various school site groups that exist on campus, their functions and information on how our parents are "working" to improve student outcomes through improving on-site parent involvement.

This orientation would be included in the registration process, parents/students would not receive programs (WHS) until this orientation has been attended and all related documents (free lunch apps) are submitted and facilitated by current parents who would share their enthusiasm, experiences and commitment to our schools and improving student outcomes;

2. On-site parent centers and parent groups conduct parent training workshops to aid parents in navigating the school's campus and equipping them to function on campus in symphony with administrators, staff and teachers.

These weekly or bi-monthly 'parent engagement workshops' would also be facilitated by parents (parent peers).

3. Lastly, possibly more specific to Westchester High, I would like to know what system is in place to secure free lunch applications from enrolling and re-enrolling families. We have discussed that students would not receive their programs until this document was submitted.

Understandably, these adjustments are aggressive and represent great change, however, I believe that if these systems are in place, all of our schools, teachers, families and students will begin to thrive and improve.

My hope is that LMU, LAUSD and 'Design Schools' in concert with parent and community supporters will be able to facilitate these much needed changes.

We cannot say we are 'working' or even 'fighting' to improve student outcomes while neglecting to acknowledge the data which states parent involvement directly impacts student achievement. It is our obligation and duty as a school community to aggressively explore and passionately pursue ways to inform, empower and involve parents and families in the day to day operations of our schools.

Unfortunately, to date, funds have not been identified or allocated to support such programs and work; however, this work MUST continue. The National Alliance of Parents for the Advancement of ALL Students (a project of Congressional District Programs, Inc. - a registered 501 (c) (3) public charity birthed out of the efforts of POWWOW) is aggressively endeavoring to raise and acquire funds which will be instrumental in supporting this valuable and priceless effort.

Thank you so much for all your encouragement and support over the course of the past year and I look forward to hearing from you soon so that we can determine the best way to accomplish these goals.

Have a wonderful Sunday!!

Sincerely,

Crissina D. Johnson

POWWOW/NationalPALS

Study shows memorizing helps general intelligence

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/31583/title/Smarten_up

Science News
May 24th, 2008; Vol.173 #17

SMARTEN UP
By Bruce Bower
April 28th, 2008

Practicing a challenging memory task spurs a surprising intelligence gain

BRAIN TRAINING
The more times people performed a daily 25-minute memory training exercise, the more their scores on a fluid intelligence test increased. Arizona State Univ. (use above link to see full article)

Link to LMU/LAUSD MOU (Memo of Understanding)

http://www.simplesend.com/clientimages/lmu/LMU_MOU_62408.pdf

WPEF July 3 Meeting: School Summit

Town meets gown! Our annual summit of school leaders will reach new heights because of the enormous progress that has been made in our family of schools over the past year. It’s time to share information and assess our needs and successes -- no more working in isolation! In addition to parent, faculty, and administrative leaders from the schools’ Autonomy Exploratory Commitees and Transition Teams, representatives from LMU will join us as we discuss what progress we’ve made and where we go next. We’re inviting community leaders and representatives from community groups such as Neighborhood Council, Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, foundations, and more.

Topics to be considered:
1. The proposed MOU (attached) between LMU and LAUSD. Does it meet our needs, are there things we’d like to see included? In particular, what is the role of proposed staff, and are there positions (such as a fundraiser for our schools) that might be more critical to our success?
2. Shouldn’t there be an MOU between LAUSD and our local I-Division schools?
3. What governance models are being considered?
4. What is Mr. Rochelle’s new role, and how do we help define it?
5. What is our relationship (if any) with new I-Division staff and Local District 3?
6. How do we include community members in the transition and governance at our schools?
7. How can community groups partner with schools – either as a family or individual schools?

These topics are meant to provoke! Please let us know if you can attend and what your affiliation is, and what you’d like to see discussed at the meeting. Fasten your seat belts, we’re likely to have a bumpy night!

Hiring Committee report from WHS TT

Hiring Committee Meeting
6/12/08 7-8 a.m.

Present: Jennifer Lisowski, Gail Levy Pat Lyon, Florence Bracy, Andrew Terranova, Carolynne Kleir, Maryann Rose

1. The group talked about the importance of pooling job candidates from national, state and local nets. We want to post any available jobs on sites like edjoin.net

2. We also talked about the immediate task facing us, which is creating job descriptions for the two administrative positions that are currently open: 1) AP for 9th Grade Academy and 2) APCS who will serve the Media and Communications SLC.

To begin our task, we have distributed the following steps:

A. Pat and Gail will seek a meeting with Principal Barner to inform her of the committee’s plans and encourage her to make us part of the interview process.
B. Jennifer, Andrew and Carolynne will locate existing job descriptions from the district for the two positions. We will also talk with SLC leads and counselors about other expectations they have of a leader in their community.
C. Florence Bracy contributed a list of descriptors for the new job descriptions. She will also continue to gather ideas from parents about what we need in an administrator.

We will communicate via email over the next several days. We are hopeful we’ll have some additional information and plans for the Transition Team when we meet again on Monday.

3. Finally, we talked about what an interview committee for an administrative position should look like. We agreed that there should be two rounds of interviews, where the pool of candidates is narrowed between the first and second. At each interview, we agreed that the following stakeholders (in addition to the principal) should be present and involved in the hiring process: a parent, a community member, an SLC lead teacher and a counselor

Welcome to the Family of Schools I-Division Blog!

This is a blog for us, by us. It is for us to share information and ideas. I'm new to the whole blog thing so if anyone has a better idea or a better name or a better format, let us know.

I'll just jump right in.

Monday afternoon, WHS had its first transition team meeting. We had about half of our members. Drew, Amy and Tashika attended from LMU. Drew led us through "norms of colloboration, which all started with "P". I usually roll my eyes at this kind of thing but I think they are actually very helpful. We volunteered for various committees, and broke out briefly to discuss the kind of things each committee would like to do.

So. . .are other schools developing hiring committees and various governance models? Does anyone have good samples? Let's talk, people!