Bridging Family-Teacher Relationships in a Predominately Latinx Title I School With a Spanish-English Dual Immersion Strand Program

Spanish-English dual immersion (DI) programs can help bridge the academic achievement gap between Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) and native English speakers. However, for DI programs to help ELLs, both teachers and parents/guardians need to be aware of their existence and long-term benefits. This case study examined under-enrollment in a Spanish-English DI strand program at a predominately Latinx neighborhood school with a sizable Spanish-speaking ELL population. The case study school faced challenges of transience, limited human and financial resources, and misinformation. Both parents and teachers reported a lack of information to make educational choices and recommendations. School employees built bridges between the school and parents by standardizing the introduction of DI at kindergarten parent-teacher conferences, improving the DI open house, and engaging the efforts of the school's bilingual secretary. Recommendations are provided for increasing parents' and teachers' access to accurate information regarding DI in accessible formats.

“Everybody Knows Everybody”: Adolescents’ Perceptions of What Helps Them Succeed in a Rural Title I School

The current study explored adolescents’ perceptions of what contributes to their experiences of success in a rural Title I school through interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Participants included adolescents who were enrolled at a rural Title I Middle/High School in the southern United States. The single campus school district serves approximately 185 students from Prekindergarten to grade 12. Approximately, 73% of the students are identified as At-Risk, 88% of the students are economically disadvantaged, and 100% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch. Ten students from this school, with assent and parental consent, participated in the current study. Participants’ ages ranged from 13 to 18, and the students represented different genders (seven males, three females) and various racial and ethnic backgrounds (three Black/African American, four Latinx, two White, and one Biracial). Results from the current study suggest low-income adolescents in a rural Title I school perceived (a) school size, (b) family support, and (c) their own internal drive to succeed as contributing to their success at school. These themes, their corresponding subthemes, and representative participant statements are included. Implications for school administrators, teachers, and counselors along with directions for future research are discussed.

Embracing a Practice of Care During Challenging Times: Voices of Social Justice Leaders

In an attempt to mitigate community spread of covid 19, many school districts cancelled face to face sessions and shifted to online instruction. As communities enacted quarantines, schools were pressed to transition learning environments to students’ homes while policymakers and leaders implemented a number of new policies and procedures. The purpose of this study explored how the covid 19 transformed the leadership of educators in three southwest Texas school districts when instruction was modified to e-learning. This qualitative study centered on the accounts and experiences of 25 elementary and secondary educators from 3 different Title I school districts in southwest Texas. The participants were graduate students in a nationally recognized program for the development of social justice leaders. As a result, this study uncovered how the practice of these educational leaders evolved to serve the Latino students in their communities. This study will highlight how the teachers’ agency helped leverage services to provide the learning opportunity for the learners.

Bridging Family-Teacher Relationships in a Predominately Latinx Title I School With a Spanish-English Dual Immersion Strand Program

Spanish-English dual immersion (DI) programs can help bridge the academic achievement gap between Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) and native English speakers. However, for DI programs to help ELLs, both teachers and parents/guardians need to be aware of their existence and long-term benefits. This case study examined under-enrollment in a Spanish-English DI strand program at a predominately Latinx neighborhood school with a sizable Spanish-speaking ELL population. The case study school faced challenges of transience, limited human and financial resources, and misinformation. Both parents and teachers reported a lack of information to make educational choices and recommendations. School employees built bridges between the school and parents by standardizing the introduction of DI at kindergarten parent-teacher conferences, improving the DI open house, and engaging the efforts of the school's bilingual secretary. Recommendations are provided for increasing parents' and teachers' access to accurate information regarding DI in accessible formats.

The Influence of School-Based Family Counseling on Elementary Students and Their Families

A family counseling intervention grounded in systemic family therapy was conducted in a Title I school-based setting with ( N = 48) kindergarten through sixth-grade student-clients and their primary caregivers. Families’ perception of family communication and satisfaction on the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale-IV was investigated to determine changes in the percentile score at three benchmarks. A repeated measure analysis of variance indicated a statistically significant difference over time in caregivers’ perception of family communication and satisfaction after 5 and 10 weeks. There was no difference in relationship to gender. School-based family counseling programs can contribute to improved family communication and satisfaction. School-based counselors can partner with institutions of higher education to provide free and accessible counseling for students and families in the greatest need.

Montessori Education and a Neighborhood School

Project SYNC (Systems, Yoked through Nuanced Collaboration) details perspectives of a community of stakeholders committed to the enhancement of early childhood (i.e., prekindergarten through grade 3) education. Although there is a growing number of public-school programs informed by the Montessori philosophy, Montessori educational experiences often take place within affluent communities. SYNC aimed to enhance the prekindergarten through grade 3 educational experiences for traditionally underserved students by transforming two traditional early childhood classrooms to Montessori settings within a diverse, Title I school. Montessori pedagogy, curricula, and materials aligned with the school’s dedicated commitment to social justice. The study, one in a series, explored the impact of Montessori education on a neighborhood school community as evidenced through stakeholder opinions, project implementation, and teacher attitudes. Project data illustrate that a Montessori educational experience created learning opportunities that supported children from culturally and ethnically diverse communities in a traditional, Title I elementary school.

COVID-19 in Utah Valley

The second week of March 2020 presented an array of unique challenges for me both professionally and personally as I adjusted my work and home life to cope with the COVID-19 virus. I had already been ailing with what (I hoped) were seasonal allergies that left me coughing, bleary-eyed, and wondering if I might be sick with COVID-19 prior to the announcements from our university and school district that we should start self-isolating and preparing for at-home instruction. As both of my children at home are competitive gymnasts, we faced another decision about whether to keep them home from training. As my work and personal email boxes began filling with announcements from my university, my department, my children’s school, my children’s gym, and even my church and extended out-of-state family, I had to fight back a growing sense of anxiety about the outside world as I looked after my physical recovery. Staying home from work, just as a symbolic gesture, made a lot of sense to me. I’d already afflicted my colleagues with my occasional coughing from my isolated office way down the corridor, but I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Although I presumed my odds of having COVID-19 were small after three trips to the doctor in the last month for secondary infections resulting from my allergies, who really knew? So, from my home office, I put into practice the skills I learned from doing remote instruction over the last several years. Up until the present challenge, I had tried to access my email only in the morning and afternoon. As news and instructions came in from my university and department, email communication became a near-constant distraction/source of information. Following our university’s lead, our college moved to all-remote instruction and social isolating. This meant moving to the Zoom video conferencing app. Fortunately, I was quite familiar with the app, so I didn’t have too hard a transition. However, at least a few of my colleagues had to make substantial changes to what and how they taught. Moreover, our students varied widely in how familiar and comfortable they were with the online interface. They valued our programs for their face-to-face emphasis, and now they were being asked to adjust everything about their experience within days. Moreover, most of my students are educational professionals themselves, so they were scrambling to provide direction and services to their own students. In the days following the university’s move to all-remote instruction, I participated in several instructional and organizational meetings with administrators and colleagues to ensure we were all in accord about the adjustments we would make to classes, and I spent hours on email coordinating with students and responding to their personal and professional concerns. I greatly reduced planned whole-group instruction in favor of individual consultation. I felt frustration at my students as they requested that I take my class instruction down to the basics. As I was teaching a course on qualitative research methods, I already felt I was barely touching on the tip of the iceberg as it was. How more stripped down could I get? At the same time, I was still recovering physically from (what I hoped were) my allergies, so I recognized that some of my frustration was my body demanding time to recover. To add to the challenges/opportunities of the first week into this at-home learning experiment, I had my two elementary-aged children at home with their own learning needs to consider. Even as I type, my third grader (who has an IEP) is in my office with me on i-Ready doing her daily math lesson on my university-issued iPad while my wife works with our sixth grader on her laptop. I find myself dividing my time between my third grader and my professional work, and I feel like neither is getting the attention they deserve. And yet, in the midst of the chaos, things are happening. Our children are getting more one-on-one time than they have in quite a while. They’re happy and adjusting. I wonder about their peers. My children attend a Title I school, and many of their parents and caregivers don’t have access to the same remote learning resources as they do. Many don’t have parents at home to supervise the well-organized instruction their teachers have provided (almost miraculously) via Google Classroom. It’s a strange new world in these early quarantine days, and I’m sure there are many opportunities and challenges ahead.

Race, Gender, and Disability and the Risk for Juvenile Justice Contact

Exclusionary school discipline has received national attention due to its association with juvenile justice contact. Research has demonstrated support for links between exclusionary discipline and negative outcomes such as school dropout and juvenile justice involvement. The purpose of this study was to examine the intersections of race, gender, and disability in explaining the risk for juvenile justice contact using a state database, representing a sample of adolescent students. Controlling for individual, school, and community characteristics that are associated with juvenile justice contact such as, race/ethnicity, previous years’ discipline rate, student retention from previous year, primary disability, whether the campus is a Title I school, as well as student body size and diversity, results suggest that disproportionality is prevalent when examining juvenile justice contacts, but the relationship among race, gender, disability, and discipline is a complicated one. Implications for understanding juvenile justice contact outcomes and future research for advancing the field are discussed.

Mi Familia

This chapter discusses the results of a writing activity during Family Literacy Night at a predominantly Hispanic, Title I school in the Southwest. This study, based on Socio-Cultural Theory (Moll, 2013), demonstrates the efficacy of asset-based approaches for instruction and assessment versus more traditional deficit models of minority education. As an analytic, the researchers applied the six Capitals from the Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) model (Yosso, 2005) to the children's writing samples. This framework revealed a variety of strengths common to Latino and bilingual households including the metalinguistic skill of translanguaging. Data was processed through Holistic Content Analysis (Lieblich, 2005) followed by thematic analysis (Falk & Blumenreich, 2005) supported by CCW. Results underscore the importance of out-of-school literacies and their affective impact on children from underserved communities. Moreover, results argue for more home- and community-based writing assignments to reveal student values, desires, and emotions, which encourage the joy of writing.