Expanded Choices For Parents
The grade school landscape has expanded in ways unimaginable just one decade ago. In a strange and perhaps unintended way, the range of options has enhanced school choices in previously stagnant communities, while also providing many students with access to learning tools and resources that eluded them in past years. School leaders' unwillingness to change and display courageous leadership has essentially led to a plethora of charter, parochial, and independent schools which offer all kinds of innovative academic programs and comprehensive curriculums from which students and parents may choose. Although certain schools may continue to be inaccessible because of financial and other academic constraints and challenges, we are still witnessing unprecedented solutions and alternatives that are making it possible for more students to gain admission into the schools that best fit their academic profiles. The leaders of many of these new charter, parochial, and independent schools are employing their financial and academic resources in ways that achieve greater access for a broader spectrum of students.
In many communities, parents are feeling a greater sense of empowerment and accountability as it pertains to their children's education. Thanks to the commitment, creativity, and support of people and organizations across a range of professions and sectors, newly developed classrooms and schools are being designed in ways that respond to diverse learning and teaching needs. Parents are forming partnerships with school administrators and teaching professionals which require their participation in their children's learning at home and at school. For so long and in so many communities, parental involvement has been the weakest cog in the wheel. Finally, we are seeing real and substantive improvement in this area. This kind of active engagement benefits the parents, students, and the classroom teachers. The expanded school choices available to parents are ironically the result of public schools declining to such a low level, that the only real options remaining were to create entirely new school prototypes that reflected the desires and hopes of students, parents, educators, and other vested stakeholders.
In many communities, parents are feeling a greater sense of empowerment and accountability as it pertains to their children's education. Thanks to the commitment, creativity, and support of people and organizations across a range of professions and sectors, newly developed classrooms and schools are being designed in ways that respond to diverse learning and teaching needs. Parents are forming partnerships with school administrators and teaching professionals which require their participation in their children's learning at home and at school. For so long and in so many communities, parental involvement has been the weakest cog in the wheel. Finally, we are seeing real and substantive improvement in this area. This kind of active engagement benefits the parents, students, and the classroom teachers. The expanded school choices available to parents are ironically the result of public schools declining to such a low level, that the only real options remaining were to create entirely new school prototypes that reflected the desires and hopes of students, parents, educators, and other vested stakeholders.
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