She has always been active in the school lives of her children. However, this was going to be Pastor Susan Hogan’s first experience as a charter-school parent. That commitment, she was about to learn at Amistad Academy’s first Parent Leadership Council meeting, might entail not only bake sales but also boarding a bus to lobby legislators in Hartford.
The Hogan family is one of three the Independent is following this school year to look at how different local schools involve parents in their children’s education. Brandon Hogan just started fifth-grad at Amistad Academy. (Click here for the last story on the Hogans.) Sue Hogan had been concerned about whether Brandon could make the transition from relaxed home-schooler to Amistad fifth-grader.
She went to Amistad last week to meet the woman who, over the phone, had convinced her to send Brandon to Amistad. According to Hogan, LaShelle Rountree, Amistad’s parent coordinator, had fielded all her concerns in the weeks leading up to signing the contract to let Brandon attend Amistad. Rountree’s candor and passion for the Amistad model had sealed the deal. Although Hogan had spoken to Rountree for hours about life at Amistad and whether Brandon would fit in, Hogan had not met the woman in the flesh.
Tonight she would meet her for the first time, for this was the school’s first meeting of the year of its Parent Leadership Council. Rountree was chairing it.
Is there something revealed in the name for Amistad’s parent group, that it is not called a “parent teacher” organization or association as at the public schools, but a “PLC,” a parent leadership council?
Rountree thought so. “Every parent at Amistad is a leader,” she said. “And here’s why.
“Because you are all needed.”
Then she gave a passionate explanation of Amistad, its parent organization Achievement First, and the charter movement.
“We are different from other schools, and when I tell you why, you’ll see why we need empowered parents. For each public school kid,” she explained, “the city receives $12,000. But for each kid at Amistad and our other four schools in New Haven, we receive only $7,800. As unjust as that is, it used to be even less,” Rountree said, “but parents like you in years past made phone calls, organized, and got on buses with us, and went to Hartford to lobby. And that’s what we may call on you to do again. And, of course, we have to work hard to fund-raise the difference.
“Last year, just before the start of the semester, the city decided it could no longer provide our kids with lunch, so we had to scramble. And we did. We rose to the occasion, without excuses, because that’s what we do here. This year we found out that they cut our nurses. We have one nurse for five schools, and we have to scramble to pay for it. That’s the way it is.
“So you see I’m really passionate about all we go through and how hard we fight for this wonderful school,” she said, as Hogan took notes and appeared to nod in agreement. “And do you know that the city still receives the $12,000 for Amistad students, even though they don’t go to the New Haven Public Schools. It’s an outrage, Amistad parents, and you should let your legislators and [SUperintendent] Reggie Mayo, and everyone know it.”
Hogan liked what she heard so far. When questions were solicited, only she had them. “Why,” she asked, “wouldn’t the funds, in the same amount as any NHPS kid, stay with the student?”
Rountree told her resoundingly that this can only be rectified by parents like Hogan in action, because parents are the constituents of the legislators who make the rules.
It’s rare that a parent meeting, which is so often about bake sales and lunch forms, should be preceded by a political lecture, but Hogan liked what she heard. “She’s a straight-shooter,” she said of Rountree. “When I asked her questions about the rules here, she gave me honest answers. No jargon. Exactly what I needed to know that the school would be right for my son.”
So Hogan volunteered to be a class mom for Ms. Lopez’s class, where Brandon spends his Amistad day. Hogan and Valenzuela will marshall support not only for those activities to support the teachers, but also when parents need to be assembled to email, phone, and write to advance the charter school, and specifically, Amistad mission.
In true Amistad fashion, which Hogan approved of, the meeting was to be kept to 50 minutes. After Rountree went through the year’s calendar of special events where the PLC is needed, there was some discussion about the school’s “culture night” event in the later winter. “There are so many holidays and cultures here, we can’t celebrate them all,” Rountree said, “so we do it all on one night. Your children will celebrate all the holidays and cultures together in one fell swoop of dance, song, the whole thing.”
“Happy Kwanza, happy Hanukah,” Hogan said, with a smile. As a pastor, did she object to this this one-holiday-celebration-fits-all approach?
“Absolutely not,” she answered. “At home we’ll celebrate Christmas just fine. Here Brandon can learn about other things. But if they celebrate Halloween,” she added, “Brandon won’t participate. That used to be a religious holiday, but no one knows that anymore. It’s now all about candy and people spending money on costumes they don’t have. It’s commercial and exploitation.”
As the parents went to collect their children, Rountree and Hogan shook hands. “Yes, I remember you, she said. Thank you, Ms. Hogan.”“Oh, thank you. You’re the reason I was convinced Brandon should come here.”
“Yes, we talked a lot.”
“A whole lot.”
Once, Hogan remembered, she had had a series of questions that kept Rountree on the phone for an hour. “Then I called her again, after I had hung up, with another question.”
“Yes,” said the parent coordinator, “when you called, I didn’t get any other work done!”
What Hogan said she likes about Rountree is what she likes about the school in general. When it says there is no such thing as too much parent involvement, they mean it, she said.
“And also, Ms. Rountree really knows what’s going on at the school, and in the bigger picture, she knows the inside of things, the truth of it, and you feel that she tells it to you. She’s a straight-up talker, as we are at home.”
After the meeting, Hogan gathered up Brandon. (Another difference with PTOs and PTAs: At Amistad’s PLC meeting, kids who accompany parents are asked to go to a different room to read or play, so the PLC meeting is less disturbed than many a similar meeting in a public school, more focused.) With Brandon nearby, Hogan talked about her only outstanding serious concern: the bus.
Brandon is picked up at 7 in the morning and is dropped off at 6 on a lonely corner, Sherman and George, where he is the only kid, she said. “It’s not safe there, especially after it’s going to start being dark in the morning and earlier at night. There have been shootings there; a 9‑year-old boy could be a target. I called up the city and they said they would consider doing what I’ve asked: moving his pick up/drop off location to our corner, two blocks away, so I can watch over him.”
But thus far Hogan hadn’t heard back from the New Haven Public School’s bus coordinator. What was the next step? “I’m going to ask Ms. Rountree to intervene for me, of course.”
Tonight, however, mother and son were not going to discuss that. They were going to continue to go over the pre-algebra order of operations: work inside the parentheses; find the value of exponents and roots; multiply and divide, left to right; and then add and subtract, also left to right. Before they left the PLC meeting for home, however, they were trying to find the hat that Brandon appeared to have lost.
For previous installments in the Independent’s series on parental involvement in local schools, click on:
Dad Meets The Teachers. All Of ‘Em
Ms. Lopez Moves Brandon’s Seat
Night-Shift Waitress Gets Xena To Class On Time
Fifth-Graders Get “Amistadized”
Board of Ed To Parents: Get Involved!
Task Force Hones Plan for Kids