17th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum will Highlight Ways Families and Communities Can be Brought into the Life of the School

The 17th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum will be held on Wednesday, May 6 at 5:30-7:30 pm in the Miller Hall Collaborative Space on the Western Washington University campus.

The forum is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Journal of Educational Controversy and the Center for Education, Equity and Diversity.

The theme of the forum is: “Bringing Family and Community Strengths into the Life of the School: the Parent Action Team,” and will feature authors of the article, “Everyone Should Feel so Connected and Safe: Using Parent Action Teams to Reach all Families” that was published in our Winter 2015 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy. The work of the Parent Action Team is a collaborative project between the Woodring College of Education and the Mt. Vernon Washington Elementary School that resulted from a 1.5 million dollar grant by the Washington State Legislature.  The grant, Collaborative Schools for Innovation & Success, aims to develop models for enhancing student learning and closing the achievement gap and for better educating teachers who are prepared to teach more effectively in today’s diverse classrooms.

The partnership has been able to create a number of innovative practices.  One such practice is the forming of a Parent Action Team as part of a research project that advised schools on ways to engage often marginalized and hard-to-reach parents  --- parents and families that have often felt alienated in the past and who often face language, poverty and other barriers that prevented them from advocating for their children or feeling a part of the school.

Bringing the strengths and assets of the family and community into the life of school is an extension of the theme of our current issue of the journal that focused on moving us away from thinking in deficits terms and instead seeing the student as a person who brings strengths and resiliency to the learning experience. 

The theme of our current issue is “Challenging the Deficit Model and the Pathologizing of Children: Envisioning Alternative Models,” and so it was just a small leap to start to think about the assets and strengths that families and communities also bring to the life of the school.

The Parent Action Team members that make up the panel include:

John Korsmo is an Associate Professor and Director of Human Services at Western Washington University.

Miguel Camarena is a parent of a Washington School student.

Andrea Clancy is Washington School CSIS co-coordinator and Reading Specialist.

Ann Eco is a parent of a Washington School student.

Ann Jones is the ESL/Family Coordinator for Mt. Vernon School District.

Bill Nutting is the Principal at Washington School.

Basilia Quiroz is a parent of two children at Washington School.

Azucena Ramirez is a Migrant Family Liaison at Washington School.

Veronica Villa-Mondragon is a parent of two children at Washington School.

Stacy Youngquist, is a parent of two children at Washington School.

Panelists will share their experiences and discuss the process and method that was used accompanied by videos, posters, pictures and a powerpoint presentation. A Q&A session with the audience will follow.

Location: Western Washington University, Miller Hall Collaborative Space

Date: Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Time: 5:30-7:30pm