Family Engagement at DAA

DAA students having a blast at the Harvest Festival thrown by DAA's parents in October.

This year, DAA has taken a strong initiative on bridging the gap between teachers, administration and families; fortunately I am a part of that bridge. Being a bridge means that I not only advocate for the students but I advocate for the parents of DAA too. I work to empower parents to be leaders in the DAA community. As a bridge, I am there to support parents understanding of their child’s educational journey while providing teachers knowledge about our families’ cultures.

In the past years at DAA, we have had a few strong DAA parent leaders that were active in the community and helped us to be great, but we needed more. I saw that there were many families that wanted to get involved, but didn’t know how. As a result, I developed a program that incentivizes volunteering at our school so that parents could be motivated to volunteer. Like our students (and me), parents need visual motivators to get up and get active! Now, we have MORE parents that are involved and engaged.

I am excited to see the amount of parents that are eager to be in their child’s classrooms. The kids are happy and more focused because they know that their parent can pop up at anytime. Teachers feel a little less stressed because our students’ families are performing the clerical portion of teaching (that we spend hours after school completing). The parents are more understanding of a teacher’s role and they can sympathize with us teachers.  Parents and teachers are truly working as partners to make our students successful!

In the month of October we had around 200 logged parent volunteer hours with more than 35 families volunteering more than twice per week. The joy around the school has increased and our community is a bit stronger. Our DAA parent group is even more powerful than the years before and they have planned two successful events. I hope to see that the next term more parents are volunteering and new parents are getting engaged!

Like Isaac Newton said, “We build too many walls and not enough bridges,” and that could only be detrimental to our students and their development. In education, no one should feel like they do not belong or they are not included in decision-making conversations. We at DAA know what is important and collaborating with our students’ first teachers (their parents) is the most important best practice.

We are FA-MAH-LY,
Ms. Johnson