Khalilah Jones joined a crowd arriving for the first parent meeting of the year at Citizens Academy and overheard a mother telling her kids, "Hurry, we're late."

"Being on time matters here?" Jones, whose two children are new to the Cleveland charter school, thought to herself. She soon found out why.

Inside the large gym, every seat was taken.

The standing-room-only meeting evolved into a noisy cheerfest, as Assistant Principal Lisa Quick reported last year's test results: Third-graders had done stunningly well, with 99 percent passing the state math exam and 98.5 percent passing reading. Nearly 96 percent of fourth-graders had passed reading and math.

And once Quick got to the fifth-grade reading results -- 100 percent! -- the place went wild. Ecstatic parents yelled, clapped and stomped.

Is it a coincidence that parent involvement at Citizens Academy and test scores are both high?

I think not.

Parenting's role in education

Visit cleveland.com/bernstein Monday evening to read the third installment of the five-part series spotlighting innovative programs and individuals that are getting parents more engaged.

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Part 1: Tutoring, other programs put mom and dad on education team



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It's not the only factor, but studies show that at every socioeconomic level, children with involved parents perform better in school.

Involved doesn't just mean helping out with bake sales. Engaged parents make sure that their children don't miss school unnecessarily and that they arrive on time. They read with them, help them master their alphabet and math facts, and essentially back up what the teacher's doing when the student is home.

Of course, Citizens Academy, which enjoys the state's top academic ranking of Excellent with Distinction, has advantages that the Cleveland public schools do not.

It has a population of parents who already have proved themselves engaged enough to sign their children up for a top-rated charter school.

And it has Tonyetta Miller, a paid staffer whose job is to promote parent engagement, to greet moms and dads warmly, sign them up for a minimum of eight volunteer hours annually, and organize a year-end assembly at which children salute their moms and dads and give them medals for participation.

Here, the parent club is the "in crowd" and members compete against one another to see who's more involved. "You will hear parents in the hall saying, 'I got two hours this week, how many do you have?' " Miller said, laughing.

Still, Citizens Academy didn't always have such robust parent participation. Miller had to build it.

Over the past two months, I've looked at schools with strong parent involvement and investigated how they nurtured them.

It starts with school leaders making it a point to seek out parents, to treat them as respected partners in their children's education, and if necessary, groom some of them to recruit their peers. It can't just be lip service. Everyone from principal to teachers to kitchen staff must go the extra mile and find clever ways to encourage and reward involvement.

For parent engagement to be most effective, it must penetrate into the home. At Citizens Academy, they've even posted a video on YouTube (search for "Citizens Academy Parent Engagement Program") that details how they do it. Teachers visit each child's house before the start of the year and ask the family to set an academic goal for the child -- perhaps an improved test score -- and create a personalized to-do list to help them achieve it.

You need more than school staff spreading the word. You have to have parents influencing fellow parents to get involved.

Brandy Davis, 33, told me she knows being a mother of four school-age kids helped her gain the confidence of fellow parents living in public housing across from Marion-Sterling School in Cleveland's Central neighborhood, where she works as a parent coach. "If a person with four children is knocking on your door trying to motivate you, they're going to think, 'If she can do it, I know I can do it.' "

Where to get started

What if your school doesn't have grant dollars or a staffer dedicated to parent engagement? Get started anyway. Here are some basic tips:

• Establish a welcome room: Many say it's a great first step in creating a parent-friendly culture at a school. Take your key volunteer parents and ask them to be there for morning drop-off a few times a week, so they can recruit parents. If you make a new connection, maximize it: Ask everyone you meet to sign up for activities and events. Ask someone, perhaps a local business, to donate a coffeepot and coffee, if your school doesn't have them.

• Identify a core group of committed parents: Ask them to recruit their peers and survey them to design programs that will fit their needs. Let parents share their skills. At Citizens Leadership Academy, a sister school to Citizens Academy, a father who runs a martial-arts studio raised his hand at orientation and offered to teach an after-school class. Another dad, a barber, is now teaching kids about owning their own businesses.

• Get kids to be your recruiters: What parent can resist a kid begging him or her to take part in a school activity? Students at Citizens Leadership Academy worked with an architect to design and plant a garden, and their enthusiasm was so contagious that it was no problem getting parents to come in during the summer to water it.

• Reward parents for at-home support: Middle school grades at Marion-Sterling School compete to see which classroom completes the most homework, and at the end of the year, the winners get recognition and so do their parents. It acknowledges that parents play a big role in homework, said Terri Davis of Beech Brook behavioral health agency. "Kids get a pizza party, and parents get a 'good job' certificate and a $10 gift card," she said. The gift acknowledges that parents play a big role in making sure homework gets done.

• Train parents to be reading tutors: This is a tried-and-true idea for Faye Spence of GradsNet, whose group trains parents all over the Cleveland district to become volunteers. She asks that parents read to their children for 30 minutes each weekday and document it. Nearly 70 parents at Paul Revere School happily complied in 2010-2011, when GradsNet introduced the program, and proudly accepted their awards at the year's end. For more information on GradsNet, call 216-858-0117.

• Get a partner: Learn more about organizations working to boost parental involvement like Esperanza and the Black Lemonade Project by attending the Cleveland School District's Parent University kickoff event from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Saturday at John Adams High School, 3817 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Breakfast and lunch will be served, and child care is available. Registration is required; call 216-858-0117 or go online to cmsdnet.net.

Or contact the Leadership Center for the Common Good, a fledgling group working to boost grass-roots parent involvement, at 216-262-6343 or via email at cook9049@yahoo.com.

Parents as leaders

Just as classrooms can plant indoor seedlings and watch them sprout, some Cleveland schools are growing their own parent leaders.

A great example is happening at Luis Munoz Marin School on the near West Side, where last year the parent organization all but dried up and blew away.

Only two parents attended the first parent meeting of the year in 2011, but this year that number zoomed to 17 and it's climbing.

What's behind the boom? "It's helped a whole lot" that more Spanish-speaking parents are starting to come to meetings, said longtime volunteer Odette May. "I'm loving it."

Much of the credit belongs to Zulayka Ruiz, family engagement specialist at Esperanza Inc., who offers workshops that train Hispanic parents to actively support their kids in school and to recruit their peers.

One of Ruiz's protegees is Emilly Lebron. As this year's president of the Marin School-Parent Organization, Lebron organizes school cleanups and bullying workshops and teaches fellow parents to solve problems. She hadn't been active in the group earlier, but now she carries a schedule packed full of events and proudly shows off the latest parent notices that go out in Spanish and English.

Esperanza Inc., a nonprofit that supports Hispanic youths' academic development, made parent engagement a centerpiece of its latest strategic plan after surveying 250 students and asking what the most influential force in their lives was.

The No. 1 answer? Their families.

Ruiz's workshops address head-on the reasons Hispanic parents don't get involved. Beyond the language barrier, some say they don't feel welcomed.

Puerto Rico-born Lebron said she now understands that her work to get Spanish-speaking parents more involved will do wonders for the kids. They'll pay more attention in school, and just seeing their parents taking part in activities will give them something to brag about and boost their self-esteem, she said.

But she's still a little nervous about her English. "When I say an incorrect word, [my daughters] help me: 'Mom, you need to say it like this,' " she said. "I want to do my best. I'm a single mom right now. My daughters are my motivation right now."

Opinions get heard

Those fears of becoming a leader in culture change don't apply to just Spanish-speakers. Many other Cleveland parents have to overcome them too, said Don Slocum, founder of Neighborhood Leadership Institute in Cleveland.

"Some parents feel they don't have a strong enough voice or they feel intimidated by the system, or by a teacher," said Slocum. His organization, launched in 1994, helps Cleveland residents identify their strengths and use them to improve their community.

"We had one lady in class, she was terrified," Slocum said.

When it came time for her to give a two-minute talk, her knees were shaking.

But what happened next was touching. Fellow class members stood up and went to the front of the room to support her as she delivered her talk. And she turned out to be quite eloquent, added Slocum, who teased the mother that she'd been hiding her light under a bushel.

"She had a gift. But it was never brought out."

Of course, there are plenty of Cleveland parents with strong opinions about local schools who aren't shy at all about expressing them.

"Parents have knowledge. They have expertise. We need to leverage that," said Michael Cook, organizer for a local grass-roots group being formed by the Washington, D.C.-based Leadership Center for the Common Good.

His group is a new resource for parents who want a voice that's not the School-Parent Organization. It plans to establish independent parent groups at 10 schools by the end of the school year.

Last summer, Cook held "listening circles" with 75 Cleveland parents and heard them ask for such things as safer schools, less teacher upheaval and smaller classes. They want the arts restored and to have a bigger voice before school decisions are made.

The upstart group is funded by some family foundations and by the Cleveland Teachers Union. It's not a political move by the union, said Executive Director Mike Foley. "They don't control us," Foley said. Rather, he said, it's simply acknowledgment of the obvious: Involved parents mean stronger schools.