Update - as of 9/30/2012

Since the very beginning of school I have been working towards my goal of increasing parental involvement to impact student achievement. I started with the creation of my action research plan and with the support of my site supervisor I created the first parent survey that rolled out in our beginning of the year parent packets. I have been extremely successful in the return of my parent surveys. I equate this success to many circumstances. First, our school utilizes these packets as a way of getting your students schedule for the new year. In other words, a completed packet allows the parent to pick up their student's schedule, which is really important to middle schoolers. Another reason may have been the bright orange paper that was used, making it difficult to loose or misplace. Either way, I have received about 715 responses with a class population of 825. I used this data to present to the collaborative team to use in making decisions on ways to increase parental involvement. I prepared for my first meeting of this group and presented the findings, as well as presenting a few research based strategies we could utilize to increase parental involvement. I am currently working to find a community organization that offers free Adult English language classes and would be willing to offer them on our campus to parents. This was an identified need through my survey. I am looking forward to next weeks meeting of the collaborative team as we focus on how to get parents into the school for meetings and involve them in the decision making progress. Our goal is to plan for the first parent meeting. I am motivated by the excitement of others to pursue increasing parent involvement and recognize the necessity of collaboration through the experiences of the team members, as they provide a knowledge base that I do not currently have.