Flashback

It’s Parent Day today.

Ok. Parent Day was Tuesday of American Education Week and I fell behind my schedule for getting this up, but still. It’s Parent Day.

I remember when I first started teaching sometime in the late 1800s when one of the moms of one of my 4th graders came to the class to apologize. She had always been The Room Mother for her kids, but this year she was working outside the home, and she was apologizing for not being able to be involved.

I said, “You’re going to be involved, because you’re a good mom. You don’t have to be a school volunteer to be involved. I’m a working mom, too, and I’m involved with my kids’ education because I make sure they do their homework and that they don’t watch too much TV and I ask what they’re doing at school, and I make them tell me. You do that every day, and it’s the best parent involvement a teacher could ask for.”

We love it when parents get involved. But just as things have changed in the world so that there are fewer and fewer stay-home parents who can even think about being school volunteers, schools, themselves, need to recognize how when they need to change to involve parents.

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