Victoria Trower, SAC Champion for Sullivan School
When Victoria Trower, a new parent at James J. Sullivan School saw "SAC Meeting" on the school's monthly calendar, she was intrigued. "So I popped in the office and I asked, 'What's that about?' and the Assistant Principal told me, 'The SAC is a place where parents can have a voice and really make a difference,'" Ms. Trower explained. "And I said, 'I wanna do that.'"
Ms. Trower’s children started attending Sullivan School in March 2016, and their previous school did not have a School Advisory Council, or SAC. Sullivan’s SAC, however, wasn’t highly functional itself. The school had started having regular SAC meetings, but they “weren’t getting the kind of response that they’d been hoping for,” Ms. Trower explained.
“This year, we have a Community Relations [Liaison] named Mr. Oquendo,” Ms. Trower continued, proudly, “who was reaching out to a lot of the families. He’s bilingual, so he’s been able to reach out to a lot of the parents who are Spanish speaking and kind of get the word out about all that’s been going on with SAC and all of the initiatives that parents could be a part of.”
Last year, Ms. Trower started volunteering in the school’s library as an assistant, but this school year, she knew she wanted to take a more active role. The SAC had an informational session in October. “There weren’t a lot of people,” she explained, “but I said, you know, if you get me and another parent I work with—Paula Johnston—then we’ll get the word out. We’ll make sure that people know what’s going on.”
The two mothers proved to be a dynamic duo. Ms. Johnston works at the school’s front desk, and Ms. Trower knows many of the families in the school because she lives in the community. “Being a community member, being involved in the community already,” helped tremendously, Ms. Trower said. “You see [families] at the corner store, you see them on the way to church, you see them if you go to the same church or the same synagogue. You seek them out.”
Ms. Trower also utilized the SAC Launch Guide for guidance in recruiting parents, families, and community members. “I read the whole thing front to back,” she said. “It had a section on how we could get the word out and promote successfully.”
The SAC Launch Guide was written by the FACE Office this school year and includes an overview of the new SAC policy, provides clear expectations for stakeholders on the SAC, and offers best practice tips for building a SAC from the ground up. The Launch Guide is available on www.philasd.org/sac under “SAC Resources.”
Mr. Oquendo, the Community Relations Liaison (CRL) at the school, assisted Ms. Trower and Ms. Johnston in printing flyers to distribute to families. Ms. Trower, who volunteered at the front desk this year, handed out flyers to families as they dropped off their children.
“We made sure that the flyers were really nice, that they looked presentable, that they had information that was concise—that it got to the point,” she said, “plus time, location.” On the back sheet of the flyer, there was a quick run-down of what the SAC was, based on the SAC Informational Flyer from www.philasd.org/sac.
Ms. Trower stressed that promoting the SAC also involved a lot of marketing. “Selling it, selling it, selling it,” she said, “and saying listen, [you] will have a stakeholder role in the school. It wasn’t just from the top down, like this was equal parts community, family, administration working together, and that they would have a say on some of the things that were going on in here, and that they would be able to make a difference.”
“That was the key selling point,” she emphasized, “that they would have a voice. That got them excited.”
From left to right: Luis Oquendo (Community Relations Liaison at Sullivan), Victoria Trower (parent & Sullivan SAC Secretary), and Joy McIntosh (Family Engagement Liaison from the FACE Office).
“By our November meeting, we had 15 new parents who had just come out to hear about it,” Ms. Trower said. Moreover, the principal, Renee Morley, had recruited dedicated staff members to be a part of SAC. “It just kind of went from there,” Ms. Trower explained.
Joy McIntosh, Sullivan’s Family Engagement Liaison, attended the November meeting and gave an in-depth overview of the SAC. “We were able to get a deep understanding of what the SAC was, and what our role was in making Sullivan School a successful school, and one that embodied all of the things that the SAC was trying to promote,” Ms. Trower said.
Ms. McIntosh also introduced the SAC Constitution at the November meeting, explaining that the SAC “is a governing body that already has somewhat of a structure, but it’s actually pretty malleable.”
She then explained that while the Constitution provides an overview of the rules and expectations of SAC, there are also SAC Bylaws, which SAC members are free to alter and make their own. “From here on out,” Ms. McIntosh told the group, “it’s all you.”
“That was really exciting,” said Ms. Trower.
During their successful November meeting, Sullivan’s SAC was able to create their SAC leadership team, and Ms. Trower was elected to be the SAC Secretary. They decided in their SAC Bylaws that Sullivan SAC would be allowed to have co-Facilitators, co-Organizers, and co-Secretaries.
“I think with our SAC, with our specific roles, we’re still not afraid to help each other out,” Ms. Trower clarified. “It’s all a team effort here. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve been able to collect so quickly here.”
Sullivan SAC has both a parent and staff member who share the Facilitator role as well as the Organizer role. Ms. Trower described it as “having two people from both sides of the fence,” which allows for greater collaboration.
“The bylaws process is still an ongoing process,” Ms. Trower explained. “We decided at our November meeting that we were going to look over the bylaws and really study them, take stock of the things that we wanted to add on, take out. Because this is a K-5 elementary school, there were certain things that didn’t pertain to us.”
The SAC members are still working on perfecting their bylaws and coming to consensus on what they want to include in them. They ultimately plan to vote on what they want to keep in and take out. To help expedite the process, the SAC has formed a subcommittee that focuses specifically on going over the bylaws and hashing out its details. “It’s a process that’s definitely collaborative,” Ms. Trower explained.
Although their bylaws are still a work in progress, Sullivan SAC has been busy moving forward to support their school vision. “We really wanted to dive into the issues that we thought were really important,” Ms. Trower explained.
To help them get started, the SAC looked at the three focus areas for SAC: supporting academic achievement, improving school climate and culture, and strengthening family engagement. The FACE Office’s SAC Support Team established these three focus areas this school year to provide guidance and clarify the purpose of SAC, which in the past was sometimes muddled.
“We said, ‘what are the top three things we want to accomplish in each [focus area]?’” Ms. Trower explained. The SAC then prioritized the items in each area in order to create a realistic “to do list” for the school year.
“So, in working with the SAC, we decided we were going to make sure our extracurricular activity clubs were up and running,” Ms. Trower said. “We wanted to make sure there was more parent communication, in the form of newsletters and things of that nature. So, we have a parent newsletter that we’ll be rolling out next week, and that will come out bi-weekly.”
The SAC also wants more opportunities for holding school-wide activities, such as plays, to get students more involved. Ms. Trower hopes that supporting student extracurricular activities would “give [students] more incentive to want to be in school, and come every day and be excited about it.”
Already, students are taking on more of a leadership role this school year. The principal and assistant principal select students to lead the morning and afternoon announcements. The SAC is also talking about creating a “student groundskeeper” program, where students are selected to keep an eye on the school’s cleanliness and take ownership over keeping the school tidy.
“Just giving them more roles,” Ms. Trower said. “We saw a correlation between children who did really well in school, based on research we had studied—children do really well in school when they have more to do than just the academics, and when they feel like they’re part of the process and when they have a voice.”
In terms of supporting academic achievement, the SAC is helping to organize a PSSA prep afterschool program, where students can get individualized tutoring and feel more prepared for the upcoming standardized test.
For the family engagement focus area, the SAC is trying to organize a family bingo night and an afterschool fitness club. “We have a parent here who’s a fitness instructor,” Ms. Trower said excitedly, “and she said that she’d love to jump in and do it.”
The SAC is working on engaging more families in a similar way, asking them to share their unique skills and resources to help support the school. For instance, because Sullivan has a high Spanish-speaking population, Ms. Trower said that the SAC wants to recruit some bilingual parents to help them interpret at future SAC meetings or family events, especially when bilingual staff are not available.
“These are things we want to incorporate into the culture so that by next year, it’s there, it’s a no-brainer,” Ms. Trower said. “I think so far, we’re on the path to accomplish everything in the time we’ve set out to do it.”
As for the SAC’s relationship with the principal, Ms. Trower said that there were no issues. The Sullivan administration has been open to parents’ needs and voices, and in turn, family members on the SAC are receptive to the principal’s and assistant principal’s plan for the school. This strong relationship between families at Sullivan and school administration has created mutual trust and respect and helped build a SAC that is supportive of all stakeholders.
“They are dedicated. They have a vision for this school,” Ms. Trower said of the principal and assistant principal, “that is completely one in the same with what the SAC is trying to accomplish. They envision a school where parents and administration and students and all the faculty are just working together to make this the best possible school it can be, academically, culture-wise, and family-wise.”
Ms. Trower, along with several other SAC members, started off as a parent volunteer in the school, and she is now an employee. The emphasis on wanting parents to volunteer in the building has contributed to the welcoming environment at Sullivan.
“I think it starts with, number one, being open and inclusive,” Ms. Trower explained. “We have a strict policy when it comes to security, but we encourage parents to volunteer.”
Mr. Oquendo, the CRL, always offers to help parents and family members obtain their clearances so that they can be in the school; he’s hosted clearances workshops where he guides aspiring volunteers through the clearance process. “They want to bring in the families and make this a place where parents feel comfortable,” Ms. Trower said.
“I think you can have a balance,” she continued. “You can keep the school secure and safe, and you can vet properly the volunteers that you want in the school, and you can still of course have them. You can do both. You can keep the school secure, and you can make parents feel like this is a place where you want them.”
Sullivan School’s welcoming environment has helped families become more engaged in their child’s education. The school not only works hard to break down barriers to volunteering (such as the clearance process), but it also strives to support families in becoming leaders. Principal Morley has hired many of her parent volunteers, something she’s proud of and wants to continue doing.
But engaging in your child’s school is also personal, especially considering the huge amount of research that indicates how much a parent’s involvement in their child’s schooling can affect the individual child for years—even decades—to come.
“When I decided to have children, I just knew that I was going to be involved in almost every aspect of their educational career,” Ms. Trower said, “because my mother and my father were. They were volunteers in my classroom, they did the school trips. My mom worked only on the weekends just so she could be available during the weekdays and be in my school. So I feel like my parents’ being a presence in my school shaped me and formed me.”
Parents/families stay aware of instructional content, homework, and test scores through being involved: they attend parent-teacher conferences, participate in workshops, keep an eye on their child’s homework completion, and are able to help their children continue learning at home.
Not only does a parent’s involvement in their child’s schooling affect how the child progresses academically, though; studies show that when parents/families are involved in their child’s education, the child tends to adapt better to school, attend school more frequently, develop better social skills, have stronger relationships with their parents, and graduate and go on to college at higher rates.
“I wanted my children to know that their mom is going to be around no matter what,” Ms. Trower said. “I care about this school because I care about them, and vice versa. I want where they are to be safe, I want them to get the best education. This is our community, and I believe in our community, and this is just a way to give back, as well as support. So that’s why I joined. I just knew I wanted to have a voice in the school, and be actively involved.”
One of the major barriers that schools face in building a SAC is recruiting and retaining family members, who are a critical part of the group and need to make up a simple majority (the largest proportion) of the SAC’s composition. Ms. Trower believes that this goes back to the importance of parents being engaged in their children’s education.
“Once you decide to have children and raise them, this is all part of the package,” Ms. Trower said. “Children need to see that their parents want to be involved with their schooling. So being involved—you have to just take the time, and honestly it’s not that bad, because if you have a team that works together, and everybody knows their position and role, and you’re willing to collaborate, it’s one hour, one month, our school tries to make it flexible—we do it between the hours of 2:00pm and 3:00pm, when parents are about to pick up their kids—so we make it accessible to them, and that was another selling point.”
Plus, Ms. Trower notes that being involved in a decision-making group like the SAC gives families the chance to change the parts of the school that they don’t like. The SAC gives family members an opportunity to voice their concerns in a productive way.
“If you don’t become involved in your school, it’s kind of hard for you to be complaining about something if you aren’t willing to be part of a solution. Everybody likes to say, ‘this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong,’” Ms. Trower explained, “but if you have the ability and you’re given the opportunity from the School District, and from the school itself, to say this is a platform for you to have a voice, this is a platform for you to contribute to your children’s education, then why not do it? Because ultimately, this governing body has a lot of influence, and it’s going to positively affect your child in the long run.”
To busy parents, she says simply, “If you take one hour out of your busy schedule to get your nails done, get your hair done, whatever it is that you do, take that time to come to the SAC and be a voice for your children.”
Of course, recruiting parents and family members is just one step in building a SAC. The real test comes with retaining parents and family members month to month and year to year.
Sullivan SAC uses constant reminders to keep their members coming back. The SAC meeting is always included on the school’s monthly calendar, flyers are always distributed before meetings, and personal reminders also go a long way.
The success of Sullivan’s SAC is a great promotional tool in and of itself. “I think that when they see the changes that are occurring, when their kids are coming home, ‘mom, we have this new extracurricular club,’ things like that,” said Mr. Trower, “it gives [families] a lot of motivation to come back and think, ‘okay, we’re not just talking about something, we’re doing it.’”
The SAC puts out a parent newsletter and/or principal’s letter to families before each SAC meeting explaining the agenda items discussed at the previous meeting and all of the actions that have been implemented as a result since that meeting.
“This keeps the momentum going,” Ms. Trower said. “They see the changes being implemented because of SAC. They’re on board; they want to keep on going.”
With all stakeholders bringing their own perspective, expertise, and energy to the table, it’s not difficult to feel excited about the possibilities of SAC.
As Ms. Trower explained, “There’s no reason why our school should be failing. There’s no reason why our school should be having major, major issues, because we’re all working together, we’re all using our voice.”
