TRANSCRIPT

Title: School-Family Partnerships With Debra Jennings June 2016 Mary Schuh: Welcome to SWIFT Unscripted. These SWIFT podcasts give you, the listener, the opportunity to hear the inside story and be part of the conversation about All Means All with leaders in the field of inclusive education and schoolwide transformation. Here we are at the SWIFT headquarters at the University of Kansas, and we’re recording a live podcast on the topic of promoting inclusive education through family engagement. Our guest today is Debra Jennings. Welcome Debra. Debra Jennings: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here with you today and to have this opportunity to share with your listeners how important it is to engage families in order to achieve All Means All. Mary: Thank you Debra. We’re so glad you’re here. Debra Jennings is the Executive CoDirector of the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network, which is a SWIFT partner organization committed to working with parents and professionals to attain the educational rights of all children, and supporting them to be fully participating, welcomed, contributing members of their schools and their communities. Among Debra’s many roles, she’s the founder of Concerned African American Parents, has served as a school board member, numerous governor appointed committees in New Jersey, and she directs New Jersey’s Statewide Technical Assistance Resource Team, which provides technical assistance and supports to parents in their local community. Again, welcome Debra. We’re so glad you’re with us today. To get us started could you give us a little historical perspective? How did you become interested in these issues? Debra: My story starts, of course as many parents, with my own child who was attending school and was a struggling reader early on, and fortunately was at the beginning of second grade. The teacher recognized that there was a challenge there and she said, “You know Debra, I think she could really benefit from some additional

 

support.” So she was taken into a class where she and a couple of other students for a few minutes every day were really working on some of the basic skills around reading—phonemic awareness and word recognition—and within a really short period she was right there and she was right on target with grade level. The next year she went to a different school and for some reason, and I’m not really clear, she was placed in a basic skills class. I visited the basic skills class and learned that they were basically starting her at pre-reading skills, no assessment of where she [was], no determination of what are her needs are, and where should she go. That started me with figuring out: ok, what’s going on in these schools, and how does it look? This is an integrated school district, and why is it seeming that mostly African American kids are in these programs that are not really addressing real needs with real strategies? With that in mind, and starting to look at the data. Myself and a number of other parents got together and started a group, Concerned African American Parents, which was really about disproportionality, over-representation in special education, and under-representation in the high honors and AP courses. Over our time together, we were able to make some really major changes in the district and it was primarily by engaging and informing parents about what’s happening, and really encouraging the district to be much more transparent about what the data is and what they’re doing about the data. Starting there is where we then were able to take off and after a few years I had the opportunity to join the SPAN Team and to really work on some of these issues at a statewide level. Mary: Let me just go back in time. Were you in this field to begin with, before you recognized that your daughter might need some additional supports in school? I mean, did you start out in this field? Debra: No, I started out as a real estate/finance person. I was in real estate and construction lending, and really excited about things like architecture and management of properties and that was my field. Then when my kids were born I was a real estate agent.

 

Mary: Wow. So you made a total career shift, and now devote your career to making sure that all kids get the supports that they need in their neighborhood schools. Debra: Yeah. Mary: And supporting other families to make sure that….. Debra: It’s beyond a career. It’s really a passion, I’d say. I do now for peanuts what I used to do for free, and I’m happy to do it both ways. Mary: Well, we’re so happy you’re a part of the SWIFT Team. You work with a lot of parents. That’s the focus of your work is supporting families. What are some of the common challenges you hear from families in their efforts to make sure that their own kids have the highest quality education and the supports they need? Debra: Well we work…I work a lot with parent leaders and parent organizations. In that work some of the greatest challenges that our parent leaders are finding is that many of the schools and school districts are not really prepared to engage parents as partners, and engage parents in decision-making processes to provide parents with that information that they really need to know about how well their schools are doing, and to have parents be part of the solution.

What we find is that parents are still often considered to be outsiders, and sometimes considered to be more part of the problem than part of the solution. When we’re working with parents it starts out around their individual children and learning how to be able to communicate effectively and to bring about conflict resolution with school districts and school personnel, and then moving into well, if this is a challenge with my individual child, is it something that’s systemic, and really finding out how we can work with districts and schools around systemic issues. The systems piece is really a big focus for us and really getting parents to be a part of that systems change. That’s where I started in SPAN and that’s been my focus since I’ve been there.

 

Mary: How do you get parents involved? What are some of the strategies that you use? What are some examples of how you might—I’m assuming you can’t just support parents to be involved from the parent perspective, but you must also be working with school communities to help them to understand the value of parent involvement? Am I correct in that? Debra: Yes. We work from both, essentially both areas. Starting with parents, we have…what we’re working on a lot in terms of parents [is] to recognize and develop their leadership and partnership skills. In fact, right now we’re working with a group of parents of children who are birth to 8, who are working around how are we going to look at the systems that are serving our young children and their families, and how can we look at what’s going on and look at where the gaps are, and what needs to happen. One of the…a couple of the tools that we’re using for that is a curriculum with modules called Serving on Groups, and it’s online servingongroups.org. Mary: Servingongroups.org? Our listeners, did you get that? Make sure to write it down. Check it out. Debra: It’s an excellent process and includes a lot of resources on what do we need to know as parents…and really all stakeholders in the different systems that serve children and families…what do we need to know in order to really be effective as being…in terms of being partners and working on groups that are making decisions about what happens in schools…what happens in child welfare systems…what happens in early learning and education.

It’s wonderful to see how the work over a period of four months, six months, and eight months really turns the light on for parents to see how they can really achieve change in their communities. We have parents now who, when they walked in the door about a year and a half ago, were they just came because they were curious and wanted to know what was going on, and didn’t really think that they were gonna be parent leaders. But just thought, “I’m gonna get some information that’s gonna help me with my individual child.” Now, when we call on folks because there’s something that’s going on, we have parents who are willing

 

and feel competent and confident in actually providing testimony before state committees and before the legislature about what it is that they really need to have in place for their children, and these are parents of young children. They are grandparents who are primary caregivers of young children and who have that passion and commitment and understanding that they are the people that can make the change that needs to happen. Mary: It sounds like a great program. Thank you for filling us in about that. You also mentioned that part of your role is working with school communities. Do you work with school administrators, policy makers, school boards, state departments of education? Debra: We work with all of those entities.

Some of the things that we’re doing with local school districts is to help school districts to form special education parent advisory groups. These groups, which are in New Jersey and a number of other states, require special education parent advisory councils at the local level. These are groups where parents are together with administrators looking at what’s going on in their education systems related to—particularly related to children with disabilities—and looking at what do we need to do in order to move forward and to improve outcomes for our children. In working with these districts, we first start out with a lot of the information that’s essential, which is what do you think should be happening in terms of engaging parents? Who are the parents who are already engaged, and more importantly who are the parents that are not engaged that we really want to make sure are a part of these decisions? We particularly have a focus on making sure that parents and caregivers from culturally and linguistically diverse families are a part of it, and so we do a lot of work with districts around that cultural competence, around how to work with cultural brokers. Often your cultural liaisons and cultural brokers are families who are in the school, and what are some of the sort of context and climate changes that you need to make in order to really support the participation of parents in these special education parent advisory groups.

 

Mary: Another question is, how would a school invite your support to come in and kind of guide them in these areas? Debra: We have a team of parent leaders who are on the ground. They’re actually going to school districts and schools and letting them know how we can help them. First of all, starting with what are so many benefits of engaging parents in all the different ways, and how parent involvement can help to improve student outcomes. But also, parent involvement can help schools in terms of making sure that schools have some of the things that they need around facilities, around services and supports, around community connections and liaisons, how parents can bring those to bear. With their understanding of the benefits, then, they’re much more open to having us to become a part of, to come and work with them. Mary: Well, and as you know, it’s parent and community engagement is one of the primary domains of the SWIFT Center. We certainly have learned [and] the research tells us that the more families are engaged in schools the greater the outcomes…academic, behavioral, social outcomes…are for all students. I can imagine that when schools start to really understand those benefits around student outcomes they’re gonna be inviting you, and welcoming you into their process. Debra: That’s one of the things I really love about the SWIFT Center—that there’s that real understanding. The transformation takes everyone to be on board with the transformation. Mary: That’s for sure. Debra: Because as the transformation is happening, those are the drivers that are gonna move the transformation. But more importantly, having those family and community partners will help to sustain that transformation. And we know that many of our schools and school districts are almost immune to change, because they’ve experienced change so much. But when you have families and

 

communities behind you as your champions and your ambassadors, that can really make a difference in terms of being able to sustain that change and having individuals who are gonna be standing up for the school and standing up for the school district, and saying this is working and we want to keep doing this. Mary: Wow, that is such an important message. I love it. Just helping our SWIFT community think about the importance of this, not just around student outcomes, but sustaining that change. I think that’s pretty powerful. Do you have any stories to share about parent engagement and how it’s making a difference for a child or a school? Debra: One of my passions that has come through my experience—my personal experience, as well as my experience in many of the communities that we work in—is that inclusion really does matter. It really does make a difference. One of the stories that happened to me, oh about ten years ago…five to ten years ago— and I still am really involved in sort of watching how inclusion has really made a difference—is around a child who was identified has having a communication delay. And so was fortunate in being able to receive services through a preschool program for students with disabilities in their local community and made really great progress in the year and a half or so that she was in that program. What was really interesting about this story is that when it was time for the assignments and placements for kindergarten to happen that the child was recommended to be placed in a segregated setting, which was really surprising for me for something like that happening in the year 2000. I know, I’m naïve—but it just was surprising that here we are in this century… Mary: What year was it? Debra: This would be like 2005. Mary: Ok.

 

Debra: And so here we are, it’s the 21st century—and kindergarten—and a student is placed in a segregated setting. One of my little sayings is, “Inclusion early and inclusion often.” If kids aren’t included early, typically they’re never really included—you know, sort of officially included. The mom and I went to visit this segregated setting and we were really very, sort of, put off by it. It was not…it didn’t have developmentally appropriate reading materials. The reading materials were of very low quality overall. There were a lot of adults in the classroom and very little student interaction. It was mostly adult to student interaction, and this is kindergarten. There should be joy in kindergarten, right? And, there just was not a lot of joy. Mary: I can imagine the scene. Debra: It was even on the lower level of the building. So, fortunately this mom had a twin, and the twin who was in the same program was being recommended for a gen. ed. Class. We went to visit the gen. ed. Class, which was a joyful place. It was bright with lots of learning going on with students who were just talking and really happy about sharing the things that they were learning with word walls and great library materials. The question that the mom asked me when we left was, “Well, why can’t they both be in the general ed. kindergarten class?” So that was the question we asked the child study team and there was some hemming and hawing. “Oh, but we love her and we think that she would do so great if we could just have her for one more year.” I think a lot of parents get that sense of these people really like my child and really want to do the best thing for my child. And maybe that’s true. But sometimes we need to push those expectations. And so that’s what we did. Here we are six years later and she has been included in gen. ed. all the way through. There’s some places that she struggles, but there are a lot of places that she shines, because she’s right there with her peers. Also she knows that she shines because she is able to demonstrate how well she’s doing in some areas. Then in the areas where she needs a little extra help there’s supports there for her, but only when she needs it—not just all the time supporting her. Mary: That’s a great story. It’s interesting—I don’t know if you realize it—but your voice actually changed when you were talking about the self-contained classroom. It

 

was kind of low and then when you started talking about the kindergarten classroom it just became full of joy. That itself I find interesting. As we close our podcast today, I’m wondering if you have any advice, some top piece of advice, that you would want to give to a family who’s exploring educational options for their son or daughter. Debra: My main…my primary advice to parents is to expect the most, to expect the best, to expect the most from our children. Because, especially from the very beginning too—even though there’s sometimes gonna be messages that come to us about all the things that our child can’t do, won’t do, will never do—the reality is we really don’t know. If we don’t try and if we don’t expect a lot and really push to get what our kids need in order for them to reach high early, then when our children become adults—and this is something that I am increasingly experiencing with families—is that when you get to the adult…also that transition to adulthood or after graduation…that we then have really just limited our children so much that they only see the limits and they don’t see where those expectations can take them and all of the possibilities. Reach for the possibilities, and, you know, if you don’t reach the highest possibility, you’re still probably gonna end up a lot higher than you thought you were in the beginning. Mary: That’s fantastic advice. I’d like to be able to point people…point our listeners to your resources. That would be the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network, Inc. and your website is… Debra: spanadvocacy.org Mary: Everyone got that? spanadvocacy.org. That’s S-P-A-N-A-D-V-O-C-A-C-Y.org. spanadvocacy.org Debra: And Mary, I’d also like to point them to parentcenterhub.org on SPAN Advocacy. You will find a lot of resources particularly related to the laws and regulations in New Jersey. At parentcenter.org, we have some national resources. You’ll find

 

information from the SWIFT Center, as well as a number of national organizations and national research areas. So do come and take a look and we’d love to hear your comments. I’ve gotta add something. Mary: Go ahead. Debra: Our Parent and Training Information Center is located in New Jersey, and a lot of what I talked about today is the work we’re doing in New Jersey. But every state, as well as a number of the territories has a Parent Training and Information Center, and/or a community parent resource center. All of them are doing some fantastic work in many of these same areas, and also in other areas including juvenile justice, working around child welfare, and really assisting and supporting families, as well as being huge resources for schools and school districts and state agencies. You can find the parent centers in your state at parentcenterhub.org/find-your-center. You can find out where the centers are in your state. I hope that you’ll reach out to these local partners and work together for the kids in your state. Mary: Thank you so much, Debra, for being part of this podcast today. In closing, we’d like to remind people to go to swiftschools.org where they can find all kinds of resources in English and in Spanish and in a variety of versions—films, podcasts, blog posts, webinars—all resources related to creating equity-based inclusive education. swiftschools.org. Thank you so much.