Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new public schools team announced Wednesday that members were delivering on their promise to help parents navigate a system long known for its bureaucratic complexity by creating a Chief Community and Family Engagement Officer, which they say will make the nation’s third-largest school system become more parent-friendly.
Research shows that parents’ relationship with a school district is vital to students’ success, but in Chicago, parents have long been left out of the equation, said Julie Woestehoff, executive director for Parents United for Responsible Education, a parent activist group.
“It’s a bureaucracy,” Ms. Woestehoff said, “and a bureaucracy has walls and gates and doors, and they like to keep them all tightly closed, but parents need to be inside.”
The district does not dispute the problem. “C.P.S. does not have a very reliable system in place to communicate directly with parents,” said Becky Carroll, a district spokeswoman.
But how to make the connection with parents, especially those not active in school affairs, has long been a question with few satisfactory answers.
Jean-Claude Brizard, the public schools’ new chief executive, said in addition to creating the position, there will be staff dedicated to community outreach in each of C.P.S.’s 19 networks of schools. The new entity may also work with existing community engagement structures, such as Local School Councils.
In the past, the Office of Local School Council and Community Support took responsibility for much of the district’s parent and community outreach. Last year, the office had a budget of $3.1 million, with 17 full-time staff members downtown but none elsewhere. That office, Ms. Carroll said, will report to the chief community and family engagement officer, who will also oversee officials in each network office.
“I think there’s a cultural shift that needs to happen within C.P.S. so that it’s more of a proactive engagement with parents and the community rather than reactive,” said Patricia O’Keefe, an organizer for the parents group Raise Your Hand.
Mr. Brizard, who conducted “listening tours” with parents during his first two months on the job, said that their most common complaint had been about the difficulty in getting information from teachers and administrators, and that the new system should help.
“Most parents are not interested in accessing downtown, they’re interested in accessing their school,” he said. “Very often the interface they have with principals and teachers and school staff, I think, is an indication of the larger bureaucratic issues we have.”
Many are skeptical that Mr. Brizard and his team can make the necessary changes.
“The system’s response when there’s a problem or an outcry about something is always to appoint one person in central office or one person in each area to take care of it,” said Donald Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, which promotes community engagement in educational policy. “But the important thing to point out is we’ve never seen that make much of a difference.”
Cherice Taylor, a parent and chairwoman of Chicago’s Head Start policy committee, is one of hundreds of parents who use the district’s parent resource center. She is angry that the district decided last month to move the center — for the fourth time — without consulting those who use it.
“They keep talking about how they want parents involved,” Ms. Taylor said, “but what you’re seeing and what they’re saying are two different things.”
Parents have limited outlets for expressing their concerns and often have to muster a certain level of knowledge and clout to get attention. They can attend a board meeting, which typically requires waiting in line for two hours just to speak for two minutes at the lectern. If they want to change something, they can organize other parents in a lobbying effort, as Raise Your Hand did two years ago to protest state budget cuts.
