New Home & School Council President, New Direction
Home and School Council President Tyrone Patterson, pictured here Superintendent of Schools Dr. William Hite.
Home and School Associations are institutions in Philadelphia; they have been in the city, building bridges between schools and homes, for decades. HSAs are managed by the Home and School Council, a volunteer board made up of parents who were previously leaders on their own school’s HSA.
Tyrone Patterson, the father of children at John Barry Elementary and Carver High School of Engineering and Science, is the new president of the Home and School Council. He has been on the Council for five years as a board member, and he previously served as the HSA President at John Barry School for three years.
While HSAs are separate from the District—they are governed and supported by the Home and School Council, not the FACE Office—they are extremely important groups in Philadelphia, both historically and currently. HSAs have provided a space for parents to advocate for their children with other concerned and passionate parents; they have been successful fundraising and event-planning bodies for many schools in our District; and they have helped parents feel valued as partners in their children’s education.
The FACE Office is excited to continue its relationship with the Home and School Council and HSAs throughout the city under the new leadership of Mr. Patterson, who has been working hard this school year to implement his vision for HSAs going forward.
Mr. Patterson’s vision is grounded in what drew him Home and School a decade ago—to help Philadelphia students. “I got involved as everyone does—for the kids,” he said. “Now I see what I can do for a bunch of other kids—and parents.”
After years of being involved in both a local HSA and the Home and School Council, Mr. Patterson has observed changes in the network of individual HSAs.
“The changes have been the parents themselves,” he explained. “Parents are more active. The Home and School was, when it first started, a mother-school thing.”
When the Home and School was founded in the mid-twentieth century, it was made up exclusively of mothers, since women oftentimes did not work outside the home at this time.
“The fathers would work, the mothers would be at home,” Mr. Patterson continued. “But now, things have changed. The fathers are at home; you have single fathers, and single mothers; people are working two jobs.”
This increase in parents’ active lifestyles has precipitated a change in the way the Council conducts its meetings. “So, while we used to have a lot of meetings, now we have to electronically do things,” he explained. “Bring it to them over their phones, as opposed to having a meeting at the school, which we’d like to have, but let’s face it…people are split between work.”
“So the way we do business now,” Mr. Patterson said, “that’s the biggest change I see.”
To address this change, the Council has started to engage parents and HSA members in increasingly digital ways, such as through texts and websites. “I’m a firm believer that if I send you a text,” Mr. Patterson said, “you’ll read the text. And I’ll put a link in that text, and you’ll hit that link. And if I make that text flowery enough, pretty enough, attractive enough—you’ll read what it has to say.”
Mr. Patterson believes that Philadelphia’s parents are more than ready to get involved in this new, technological way. “We’ve got a lot of great parents, with a lot of talent,” he said. “They can do it. We just have to put their talents together and bring them out.”
His hope is that by making meetings and trainings more accessible through technology, more and more parents will be willing to get involved and start affecting change at their schools. Believing that every parent has a role to play in supporting education in the city, Mr. Patterson aims to draw out individual talents so that parents can feel empowered to get involved. “I want to find the best parts of parents,” he explained.
He also believes strongly in the power of information sharing, and he plans to increase the Council’s efforts around information sharing in the future. “Parents want to help their kids,” he said, “but they really don’t have the up-to-date information, and it’s changing so fast. What we thought last year is not true this year.”
“So we have to keep up with these things,” Mr. Patterson continued, “and we have to use everything to our advantage. That’s what I want to do.”
So far this year, Mr. Patterson is trying to keep HSA members updated on new information by utilizing phone conferences and YouTube. “We’re getting closer and closer to that dream, where if you can’t make the meeting, you can use your phone,” he said, “so you can get that information.”
Mr. Patterson is also trying to keep members engaged by creating “two-way communication” during meetings. In previous years, general membership meetings for the Council happened by topic, such as how to advocate for a child with special needs, or how to opt out of the PSSA. Mr. Patterson has continued this structure, but he has also emphasized to members that he wants to hear their voice.
“You can send in your questions,” he explained. “So based on the data, if it’s everyone screaming about pre-K, then we’re gonna bring you pre-K.”
This school year, the Council’s general membership meetings have featured Dr. Hite’s Office, Community Schools, Kindergarten, and Title I.
Mr. Patterson tries to stay abreast of what’s relevant and important to people. “We had Helen Gym in here talking about what changes Washington is going to make and how it’ll affect Philadelphia if we’re a sanctuary city,” he said.
He also wants to collaborate with other departments in the District and key stakeholders in schools so as to “connect the dots” for parents. “We want to move right on to counselors and the FACE Team,” Mr. Patterson explained, to determine “what all these components in the school mean to the parent. That’s what they need to know.”
Mr. Patterson hopes that through such collaboration and information sharing, parents will know who to go to—other than the principal—if they have a question or a problem. Ultimately, he wants parents to become self-advocates.
“I think Home and School’s job is to get the parents to know, ‘this is what I need to know,’” he said.
Mr. Patterson also hopes to promote a shift in how parents think about the Home and School’s purpose. He wants HSAs to focus more on information sharing and educating other parents and less on pretzel sales and fundraising.
“You just can’t raise enough money to buy anything for your school,” he explained. “Not anymore. Writing grants now is the thing. So we have to educate.”
Mr. Patterson plans to work collectively with other family engagement groups in the city to achieve this goal of educating parents about how to support their children’s education. “We have a lot of groups,” he remarked. “Friends Of, Parent Power, PTOs, PTAs. I think we all need to get together and help the parents in what it is they need.”
“My objective is, whatever works for you as a parent,” Mr. Patterson continued. “If PTO works for you as a parent, I’m gonna give you that option. I want to give the parent every option conceivable. That’s my whole game—nothing else.”
Despite his clear vision for moving the Home and School forward and shifting towards a more collective impact model, Mr. Patterson admits that he didn’t actually want to be president—he was thrown into it. “I don’t want to be the face [of Home and School],” he said, but rather, he wants to share as much information as possible so that parents can feel empowered to make well-informed choices of their own.
By supplying parents with the information they need to make decisions and understand what’s going on at the school level, Mr. Patterson hopes that parents can better support their children academically and socially. With greater knowledge of the policies, procedures, and systems, parents will also learn to advocate for their children more effectively. Mr. Patterson reminds parents to approach their schools and school administrators in this collaborative mindset: “I’m not here to argue, I’m here to educate my child. Now what is it that we can do to educate my child?”
