Parent and Community Engagement Workgroup
Orange County Preschool Planning Collaborative
3. Parent and Community Engagement
Chair: Paul Ramirez, Chair, Orange County Child Care and Development Planning Council, paul@bgcgg.org
Liaison: Jeanne Awrey, jawrey@ocde.us
This work group will work on methods and modalities of parent and community engagement. Parents are the most critical support group to the preschool plan. Without their engagement, family bonding and commitment to education will be lost, despite the best efforts of the teachers and staff within a program. Parent engagement was the foundation of the two U.S. programs that have reported the highest gains in life skills, income, and crime avoidance. Many models of parent engagement exist, from Head Start to Family Literacy models being supported locally. This work group will recommend one or more approaches to not only reaching out to parents, but securing their engagement in the child's learning from early childhood and into the future.
Community engagement is differentiated from parent engagement because it involves building broad community support for the new system, independent or above and beyond what parents may do. There are many components of this system that will need funding. Developing an outreach approach for informing and interacting with community stakeholders will insure that the system also has a form of public accountability. It is up to this work group to think of ways to achieve both goals-making preschool a public interest, and creating advisory processes that foster community dialogue and promote accountability.
The work to be accomplished should be staged into 2, 5, and 7 year goals.
