Tiffany Anderson knows how to bring her community together to get things done, no matter what.
“Programs come and go. Systems remain and they will outlive you,” said Anderson, the first African American female superintendent of the Topeka Public Schools in Topeka, Kan., and the author of Building Parent Capacity in High-Poverty Schools: Actions for Authentic Impact.
Her AASA national conference session on Saturday morning was titled “Parent and Community Engagement: Building Parent Capacity.”
Anderson, a past winner of AASA’s Women in School Leadership Award, addressed how she connected families to the schools in her urban district and those in surrounding communities to get directly involved in bettering students' lives to improve their learning opportunities.
One of the effective ways she got parents involved was the use of a districtwide parent advisory committee. The committee’s members decide on an area of focus every year, including such issues as bullying or school environment. They research the chosen issue, examine what other schools or districts are doing, conduct surveys and create recommendations for action by the district, Anderson said. At the end of the school year, the advisory group presents its findings to the school board.
The process tends to invest parents in their children’s schools and encourages them to take charge of other projects, Anderson said.
As a result of her districtwide engagement initiatives, Topeka students’ academic scores, graduation rates, scholarship funds and participation by families increased exponentially, the superintendent said. All of this came about by addressing family structures and implementing systems to support positive outcomes for students.
But how can a school district take on this work on a limited budget? Anderson told attendees, “If you ask for these resources first, 95 percent of the time, the responses are “The district can’t afford it.” Her advice: Be creative to solve the barrier. Look for alternatives (grants, loans, donations and partnerships) to fund initiatives. Put people first and build rapport with students and their families.
Anderson said the school district has established food banks, student homeless shelters, clothing drives, increased teachers' salaries, laundry services in schools for low-income families, training programs for refugees and much more.
She has used experiences from her long career in public school leadership to apply to her work in the Topeka system, where she’s been the superintendent since 2016. The practices she has introduced to raise family engagement are applicable across urban, rural and suburban districts wherever there are high-poverty schools, Anderson said.
“Demographics and zip codes should not determine destiny,” she added.
(Ecoi Lewis, a graduate student in the marketing and communications program at Loyola University New Orleans, is a reporter with Conference Daily Online.)
