Engaging Parents in Red Hook By Consulting the Folks Who Do it Best
From live streaming public meetings to rethinking them entirely, here’s how I’ve been engaging families in Red Hook around local education politics
Three years ago, if you uttered the words ‘parent engagement’ to me, they would have registered as a chore — another initiative to memorize and regurgitate to prospective parents during recruitment nights. The school I worked at in South Florida had some criticisms about not having enough parent involvement, but at the high school level, this can be pretty common.
As a second year teacher in charge of three different courses, tutoring after school, and running a student poetry club, I had a lot on my plate. Cultivating positive classroom culture and meeting my students’ academic and emotional needs were on the forefront of my mind, leaving parents by the wayside. To be honest, I was also genuinely afraid of interacting with parents—I dreaded even calling them on the phone.
Early on, I had discovered that I didn’t exactly get along with parents — especially the “helicopter parents” (a nickname to describe their tendency to hover over teachers). After an experience battling a parent who tried to get a novel banned from my classroom after I had fought just to get the money for a complete class set, I wasn’t exactly vibing with the idea of inviting more parents into my classroom. So, the fact that most of my students’ parents were often silent or mysteriously missing from parent-teacher conferences was just fine in my book.
But, this was before I moved to New York, before I changed my career to journalism, before I began discovering the reasons behind why some parents don’t show up to places they’re invited to.
In my social journalism program, we’re asked to choose communities to work with, rather than traditional ‘beats’ or topics to report on. Even then, I clung to my irrational fear of parents, and sought after communities of students or teachers to focus on. After dabbling with the vast world of special education students, and attempting to find a place in the alternative education community, I returned to the very topic that drove me to leave the teaching profession — the modern segregation of public schools. (you can read more about that journey here).
Finding a community to fit this issue is simple because the public school system in NYC also happens to be one of the most racially and economically segregated in the country. And the schools in the district I chose to cover, District 15, are among the most socio-economically and racially segregated schools in New York City. But entire schools districts are not close-knit communities, and solving school segregation is too large of an issue to tackle (if Nikole Hannah-Jones can’t do it, no one can).
Why Education Meetings? Why District 15?
So to find more a specific issue within this district, I began attending public education meetings — both the community and business ones — held by the Community Education Council in Brooklyn’s District 15. A word on this jargon-filled sentence: In New York City, Community Education Councils hold monthly public meetings with the district superintendent to discuss school-related issues, review and assess the district’s educational programs, prioritize requests for capital improvements in district schools, and sometimes approve rezoning proposals. All of this sounds very official and important — and in a way, it is. Education Councils are a part of New York City’s school governance structure, offering parents the opportunity to become elected officials that hold actual power. For community education councils (CECs), these eleven voting members have the power to impact educational decisions at the district level. Helicopter parents could never!
For the past year in District 15, these meetings were particularly important because the conversation was around rezoning. Education leaders were proposing two versions of a rezoning plan which would re-draw lines for seven elementary schools in Brooklyn. The plan was supposed to relieve overcrowding at some of the district’s most popular schools and encourage diversity in the district’s most segregated schools. The CEC meetings served as a physical space for parents to be in the same room as Department of Education leaders, so that they could give feedback on which rezoning plan they preferred. CEC members would take this parent feedback into consideration before they voted on a plan.
The Problem
As I began showing up to these meetings, I started to notice a pattern: most parents in attendance were white and from affluent neighborhoods. This struck me as a problem because 1) District 15 is not a majority white district (less than a third of the students are white) and 2) one of the goals of the rezoning plans was to integrate elementary schools that were starkly segregated by race and class. It goes without saying that having a diverse group of people in the room while making decisions about diversity is…..necessary? required? the bare minimum of how integration should be done?
But don’t take it from me, the lack of representation from neighborhoods with large minority groups was on the top of everyone’s mind at these meetings. Here’s a few things I heard from parents at CEC meetings:
“I don’t feel like we have the resources that help engage our own communities, and really make sure everybody’s got a voice. I’m skeptical that will have success on the integration without more tools.” —Lincoln Ritter.
“When we’re talking about the idea of engagement in communities of color, there has to be far more intentionality of collaboration…an email and a flyer doesn’t cut it. When information is being dispersed, there just has to be more strategy and more on the ground engagement.” — Edwin Pacheco.
“They’re not all six o’clock in the evening. The president’s council meeting is nine o’clock on a Friday morning. I can’t even attend.” —Jamila Nicholas on why it’s difficult for working parents to be on the council.
Red Hook Claps Back
One neighborhood in particular felt particularly excluded: Red Hook. Community leaders in Red Hook felt that neither plans adequately addressed the needs of P.S. 676, one of the city’s lowest performing elementary schools that leaders have been working tirelessly for the past two years to improve.
Under one of the rezoning plans on the table, elementary school zones were to be redrawn to reduce attendance at overcrowded schools. This plan wouldn’t change attendance boundaries for P.S. 676, which is the elementary school with the lowest enrollment numbers in the entire district. Without new boundaries, new students from other neighborhoods cannot attend P.S. 676, leaving their low enrollment numbers unchanged.
The second plan proposed removing attendance zones entirely, giving families the freedom to choose any school in the district. This plan would affect families zoned for P.S. 676 by giving them new options, putting even more pressure on the school’s already dwindling enrollment.
Aside from the plans themselves excluding Red Hook, leaders felt that the city had not done enough to engage Red Hook in the initial creation of the plan, and that DOE’s outreach was unequal across neighborhoods. One parent I later spoke with summarized the problem in his own words:
“In Red Hook, parents don’t know what’s going on. A lot of that is because the DOE’s framework for engagement is sending a flyer home and sending an email. When you’re a parent, and you have kids, and you may be working…trying to make ends meet, and you’re doing stuff on the side, and that flyer may get lost in the shuffle. And you may not have the time to follow up on an email or you may not even have an email address because you don’t have a computer internet at home. Things like that just are real challenges in a community like this.”—Edwin Pacheco, parent and activist in Red Hook.
The community felt so strongly that they created a coalition of Brooklyn leaders and sent a letter asking the city and the Community Education Council to delay the rezoning decision until all communities were adequately heard from.
“If the rezoning is to improve equity, it must be conducted through a fully participatory process considering all schools impacted by the rezoning process,” the letter read (obtained from Chalkbeat).
Additionally, some Red Hook leaders organized a community meeting in Red Hook to let residents know what was going on with the rezoning process, and ask DOE officials to delay the rezoning process.
Aside from the lack of representation of communities of color, it appeared to me that the way the DOE was collecting feedback from parents was ineffective and gave way to groupthink, a phenomenon where the most outspoken person in the group persuades the decisions of the rest. Much like a chaotic Kindergarten classroom, the loudest parents in the group were able to have their opinions heard over those who remained quiet.
So the problems I identified in District 15 could be broken down into three main buckets:
- Big Picture: Communities of color were being excluded from the district’s planning process
- Targeted exclusion: Red Hook was excluded from the rezoning plan itself and the decision making process around rezoning
- Systemic: The process of engaging parents in D15 is ineffective and favors outspoken parents.
Deep Listening Can Take Many Forms
In the midst of all of this, I began thinking of ways that journalism could help solve some of these issues. But, I wanted to listen to more people in Red Hook to gain more insight on the root of the problem before creating something. So I began reaching out to people on and offline in the Red Hook community by chatting with parents at meetings, finding community leaders on Facebook groups like this one, and showing up to other spaces where I might find parents gathering.
Without knowing exactly what my role was going to be in all of this, it was sometimes difficult to explain who I was or why I was interested in learning more from people in the community. I tried to keep my outreach emails short and sweet. Here’s an example of something I would send to people I wanted to speak with:
Hello!
My name is Lauren and I’m a graduate student at CUNY studying how to use journalism to engage local communities. I’m currently doing a long term project on engaging parents around the Diversity Plan in District 15. My ultimate goal is to facilitate conversations around DOE Diversity initiatives in a way that brings communities of color into the conversation in a more comprehensive way. Discussion around the rezoning plan in D15 is one of the main things I’m researching now.
I can see from the info on your flyer that we may have some shared goals. Maybe we could collaborate in the future. In the meantime, I would love to run some ideas by you in terms of my project. Would you be open to talking with me on the phone sometime this week?
And when that didn’t work, I found the people I was trying to reach and introduced myself in person. This sounds stalker-ish, I know, but I can tell you that it works 100 times better than any email or phone call. People actually do appreciate you showing up to their events.
In the midst of this outreach, I spent one Saturday afternoon at the Red Hook Public Library where The CITY was hosting their Open Newsroom Project, to see what other issues residents were concerned about in the community. To my surprise, the room’s discussion focused solely on education and it’s here where I found out that many residents had a lot of questions about what was actually going on with the current rezoning plan. From the small group conversations I sat in on that day, it became clear that there was a lot of confusion about what the DOE was proposing, who it would affect, and how residents could provide more feedback. I made some contacts here that I still reach out to this day, even if it is just to let them know about an education meeting.
The more I spoke with people who were affected by the issue, the more I was able to better understand where I could fit in to this equation. After narrowing the problem even further, I decided that with my project I wanted to answer these main questions:
- How can I inform parents in Red Hook about meetings and information regarding changes to their school district?
- How can I encourage more Red Hook community involvement in educational issues?
- How can I share stories about public schools in Red Hook in a way that combats the existing negative stereotypes?
My Initial Solution
To address these questions, I built a website called RedConnect: an all-in-one virtual platform that aims to bring awareness to educational issues that affect Red Hook residents while encouraging involvement in local education groups. The platform also aims to humanize people some of the problems residents are facing with their own public schools.
The platform is designed for Red Hook families, but anyone might find it useful who wants more information about the rezoning process or how to get involved in the CEC. Though much of the information on the website could be found at the bimonthly Community Education Council meetings — RedConnect is a virtual space that residents could access at any moment, and offered more in depth information about issues that Red Hook residents wanted more information about.
Problem Solved?
As with any project, there were of course some road blocks. I spent a lot of time collecting information and putting it all in one place. And yes, it might be useful to Red Hook parents—if they could find it. You may have already spotted the holes in this, but if not let me spell them out for you:
- Many people in this community are already going to trusted spaces to get information. What would make them come to mine?
- The Red Hook Community relies heavily on in-person interactions with trusted members of the community and the whole project lives online.
So what did I do? Give up? Cry? Start over? No, no, and No (time) for that. I went back into the community and started paying attention to solutions instead of focusing so much on the problems.
I started meeting regularly with one community member in particular, who has taught me a lot about how information flows in Red Hook and how to get parents engaged. Meet Edwin Pacheco.
Edwin is a pastor at a church in Red Hook, a community activist, and event organizer who shows up to almost every public education meeting in his district. He does this so that he can be an information liaison for people in his community, and bring back important takeaways from the meetings to share it with them—at bus stops, in church, at NYCHA meetings. He’s finds people where they are and brings information to them in a way that works for them.
He’s also an expert at rallying people around a common cause.
Remember that rezoning meeting I referenced earlier organized by Red Hook leaders? Well Edwin was one of the people who organized that meeting, and got over 75 people in Red Hook to show up and participate. He’s part of the reason why the rezoning decision has been delayed another year to allow time for the DOE to conduct Participatory Action Research in the community.
I would often probe Edwin around the issue of parent engagement in Red Hook. How do we motivate parents to come to meetings while also empowering them to participate in conversations about equity in schools? On this issue, Edwin told me something that struck me: He said parents in Red Hook don’t always feel “equipped or adequate to sit at the table,” and he’s telling them, “sit at the table anyway, and I’m going to sit next to you.” Meaning, if you don’t feel comfortable speaking in public about these complex issues, show up anyway and I’ll be there to help you understand.
Helping people understand complex issues is one of journalists main jobs. But, if the people who need this information most aren’t getting it, then we’ve failed, and we need a new approach.
My New Approach
After speaking with Edwin and other leaders like Catherine McBride from Red Hook Initiative and Marie Hueston, parent coordinator at P.S. 676, I realized that people were already doing great work around engaging parents in Red Hook. I figured that working with them by leveraging their solutions would be a better strategy than the “build it and they will come” model, which in my opinion, is where many traditional news outlets fall short.
One thing I did was start a Facebook Group, to get Red Hook parents talking with each other about education issues in D15. I wanted a space for just Red Hook residents to go to share information and ideas. I’m already learning a lot. For example, Karen (who gave me permission to share this) points out that the DOE can’t be solely blamed for the lack of parent involvement, and that community members need to be educate each other on why showing up to these local meetings is so important.
There’s over 25 members now, and Edwin is an administrator on the page, so we’re doing this together.
“People really want to know what’s happening and what’s going on…there are two other pages that are mainly maintained by Carroll Gardens people and almost no one from Red Hook is on that page and it’s around rezoning. So having one for Red Hook specifically is really cool.” -Edwin Pacheco.
Meeting Livestreams
Then, after discussions with the community and with the CEC president, I began live-streaming the public education meetings, so that people who couldn’t show up could have another way to access them. Chalkbeat, a leading education news site, liked this idea, and decided to post the stream on their website, as well as a description of me and the RedConnect project.
To spread the word about the livestream, I used community channels, like the Red Hook Hub, to share the link out into the community.
My first livestream — one with not very great audio I may add — got over 80 views, and the key takeaways article I posted on Medium got 22 views. I think considering the niche interest in the information presented at these meetings, this is pretty good engagement. But, perhaps a more telling metric, was finding parents on Facebook share out the livestream link on their own, to parents who needed it.
Heroes of PS 676
Another project I’m currently working on with a parent coordinator in Red Hook, is called Heroes of PS 676, which is a collection of portraits and stories highlighting the people who have been working to transform PS 676 from a failing school to a place where parents are happy to send their kids. To begin the project, Marie Hueston, the school’s parent coordinator, and Principal Figueroa sent me a list of key members of the school to reach out to. At the end of every interview, I ask the hero who they think should be nominated as a hero of the school, and then I interview this person, so on and so forth. The interviews and portraits will live online along with a nomination form, so that community members outside of the school can nominate other students or parents to be interviewed.
This project was borne out of deep listening, and serves a more nuanced need of the Red Hook community, which is to help destigmatize schools like PS 676 and dismantle the negative reputation that’s been plaguing Red Hook schools for over 30 years. I’m hoping that eventually, the portraits and stories can live offline as well. And though it’s in its early stages, I’ve already gotten some good feedback from Principal Figueroa who—rightfully so—was a bit skeptical in the beginning about letting me come and poke around at the school every week. She said that after I get the project up and running she wants to continue the work after I’m gone by training 4th and 5th grade classes on how to interview and take portraits.
“It would kind of be like a service project…they can train other students to continue doing it and then their work can continue in the community as they move on.” —Principal Figueroa
What This Process has Taught Me about Journalism
One of the biggest takeaways journalists can learn from my process, is that “build it and they will come” is a myth. The key to overcoming this is to establish real relationships with the community, and understand how their news ecosystem works.
Another big lesson I learned from the Red Hook community in particular: when decades of mistrust have eroded relationships between marginalized populations and governmental systems like the DOE, you can’t mistake silence for apathy or disinterest in being involved. On that note, don’t expect people to trust you right away, it takes time and energy, and showing up to places and leaving the recorder at home. I never showed up to Red Hook looking for a story. I listened. For problems, for solutions, for opportunities to fill gaps or lift up community solutions. Naturally, stories will come out of this process. But, it’s important to go in with a bigger goal in mind: to help. Lastly, all communities have networks and solutions, and it’s not enough to just highlight them in our coverage anymore, we need to work with the community to create actionable impact.
