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Parent mentors and Parent Mentor Program graduates have reciprocated by creating community schools where families feel at home. They have:
These are only a few examples. The point here is not to provide a list of things that organizations and schools should do. The point is to emphasize that by truly welcoming parents, providing them a legitimate space within the school, and encouraging and respecting their knowledge, one opens the door to limitless opportunities.
At the core of the parent mentor experience is a personal transformation from a private, often isolated immigrant or welfare mother to a person who sees herself as a school or community leader. Parents have led the transformation of schools, teachers, and the community.
Support and Challenges
This work may sound simple, but in practice, LSNA has had to build a structure to provide support for the parents. Each parent mentor group has a paid half-time coordinator who is a former parent mentor, works out of the school, and attends biweekly meetings with the other coordinators at LSNA. Her supervisor is an LSNA education organizer who is responsible for both the Parent Mentor and Literacy Ambassador programs in four schools. These organizers spend quite a bit of time at each school, mentoring the coordinators, meeting with principals, and getting to know the parents. In two schools, the parent mentor coordinator is paid by the school system as a “school-community representative” and, therefore, does additional work for the school.
LSNA’s education organizers build bridges and trust in a variety of ways – from negotiating tensions, to inventing programs, to helping parents implement projects they create, to giving workshops about neighborhood issues and holding discussions to get people’s input. 
At their biweekly meetings, coordinators exchange information, make joint decisions about the program, and solve problems.
At every level, people are mentoring each other and learning from each other. Supervisors try to take advantage of every leadership opportunity to help newer people develop while helping the organization thrive – running meetings, testifying at funding meetings, talking to the LSNA board, testifying at the Illinois State Board of Education. Technical assistance comprises everything from computer training to helping people write and practice their public speeches.
New ideas are always being implemented and can come from anywhere. For example, we developed a “minigrant” program where a group of parents in a school could apply for $300 to buy food or supplies for a parentorganized event that involved parents, students, and teachers and had some educational or cultural purpose. We did that after various parents had said they would like to hold events in the school but had no resources to do it. Similarly, the Literacy Ambassadors program was created in response to parents in focus groups saying they wanted ways to help connect with the parents that never came to school.
Yet, as we move forward, we face challenges.The work of involving parents in schools is continually breaking boundaries and subverting the mainstream paradigm of schooling. Teachers visiting homes? Low-income parents tutoring students? Most teachers have not been trained to place a high priority on relations with parents, much less lean on them for academic support. Most new parent mentors don’t believe they can really tutor. Both believe teaching is primarily a “technical” rather than a “relational” act.Many teachers are afraid to visit poor families. Families are afraid to invite them, and wonder what they can feed them and if they have enough chairs. Experience has changed these and other divisive assumptions. But getting some people to take the first step has required belief and persistence by LSNA staff and parents.
Principals also balk initially at sharing their buildings. Community centers have raised turf and power issues. Disputes often arise from such minor concerns as missing chalk and toilet paper. Teachers and janitors may complain to principals, who are caught
in the middle. And polite but empowered parents and principals sometimes disagree. In one case, a principal did not want to keep his building open in the summer for LSNA’s community center. Finally, one LSNA staff person (a former LSC parent member who had hired that principal) suggested that the LSC parents meet with him to talk
about it. He was cordial and agreed to open the school, given a couple of provisions – he wanted us to hire his assistant to be there while the building was open.
Logan Square schools have become more complex. They are no longer just places where professionals teach poor children and the lines of power are clear. Non-professional parents are more present, have more power, and are becoming more educated. Students feel more ownership. In this cross-class, cross-cultural, more-democratic community, conflicts and misunderstandings arise frequently. LSNA is a constant informal mediator, always clear that families are its main constituency but that the project requires full collaboration with the schools. One of LSNA’s roles has been to build the social trust that supports the complexity inside the school and the political capital to support it outside – whether at the district level, in politics, or with funders.
Funding, of course, is another constant challenge. For twelve years, LSNA has pieced together public and privatefunding to sustain its education work, now close to $2 million a year. State funds, thanks to Latino state legislators, and federal funds, courtesy of the 21st Century Community Learning Center program, have been essential, as has support from the many private funders who value the marriage of education reform and community organizing that LSNA has modeled.
Today we face two specific funding challenges. First, under rules of the federal CLC program, our community centers will likely not be refunded if our schools improve too much and are no longer classified as low performing. The second is the short-term nature of funding from foundations, who expect our work to become “self sufficient.” Ultimately, to survive and become part of “what a school is,” these programs must receive permanent public funding.
Changing the Paradigm of Schooling
Logan Square schools – large, urban, low-income, immigrant schools – have moved part-way down the road to transformation, with organized mothers in the lead. Transformation of parents, teachers, and schools is possible, but the paradigm of schooling must change. Students must be seen not as blank slates ready to be filled by information, but as already partially formed cultural beings with their own cultural and social capital. Bilingualism and cultural complexity must be seen as assets, not deficits to be overcome. Parents are central to the educational system, not outsiders. And by treating them as partners and welcoming what they have to offer into the classroom, we can create schools that engage students and increase student achievement.
