DCPS is forming five parent advisory boards for school year 2018-19. The deadline for signing up is midnight tomorrow, Friday June 22.
The boards are:
–Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Board
–Deputy Chancellor for Social Emotional and Academic Development Parent Advisory Board
–Deputy Chancellor of Innovation and Systems Improvement Advisory Board
–Special Education Parent Advisory Board
–Strategic School Planning Advisory Board
The DCPS website has a website devoted to explaining what the boards are. For more information and to apply, see this website.
NB: Some of the boards will have as members people who are not necessarily affiliated with DCPS. To be fair, DCPS is selling these as parent and community advisory boards, and community members are often valuable sources of information and engagement.
Except for the *who* of those community members.
Does that include paid staff members of advocacy groups?
Does that include charter school parents who currently don’t have a child in DCPS schools?
(And let’s not forget: Does the charter board have DCPS parents advising it? I know the charter board has definitely ignored DCPS parents.)
And then there’s the messy little problem that by doing this, DCPS is helping ensure the continuing disenfranchisement of its own parents from their schools.
(Yes, it starts at the top: Hi Mayor Bowser! Hope the chancellor search is going well! How about following the law and including parents and teachers with it?)
So, be sure to sign up–if only to remind DCPS of the folks with real skin in the game.
educationdc 
Couple of questions:
What does NB mean?
And what does this sentence:
“And then there’s the messy little problem that by doing this, DCPS is helping ensure the continuing disenfranchisement of its own parents from their schools.” mean? I’m sorry to say I don’t get the point there.
Thanks.
LikeLike
NB = nota bene, “note well.”
DCPS is unwittingly helping to disenfranchise parents from their own schools when it doesn’t ensure that the people selected for its advisory boards have actual connections to its schools. This is not about the virtues (or lack thereof) of “community members.” Rather, there is utterly no clarity here about who those “community members” are or the parameters for their selection.
Further, DCPS has schools where PTAs and LSATs may be inactive or even nonexistent and where parents might not feel engaged or even welcomed. Why wouldn’t DCPS ensure first that the people with actual kids at DCPS schools are fully engaged in these efforts in every way possible?
Then, too, there is the fact that the mayor is supposedly selecting a chancellor at this moment. It’s 3 days after the primary, when she said she’d start her search–and I as a DCPS parent haven’t heard a word. What parents are advising on that, as the law calls for? What teachers? There are now less than 12 hours to sign up for these advisory boards–and yet the law calls for actual parents and teachers to be involved in helping select a new chancellor. And there’s silence.
All that’s disenfranchisement to me. But maybe another term would suffice: disrespect of the public?
LikeLike
Disrespect for the public–that I get. I think it was the word disenfranchisement that threw me off because I associate enfranchisement with having the right to vote, rather than to merely advise.
But your point that DCPS should be more scrupulous in ensuring that members of the community who might be selected for one of these boards are, in fact, members of the DCPS going community–like you said, the ones with skin in the game, namely their flesh and blood off spring– is one I could not agree with more.
Thanks for the clarification!
LikeLike