The city is trying to reach parents of kids in the lowest-performing schools by taking the old-fashioned approach.
It’s come to this: The New York City Department of Education has trained special outreach workers to knock on doors in the friendliest-sounding way. The goal is to get those doors–at the homes of each and every one of the families at the city’s 94 lowest-performing schools–to open. Those parents as a whole are dismally disconnected from their child’s education, to the extent that the schools in question have no PTAs nor parent-teacher conferences.
So Mayor de Blasio’s administration is taking it to the streets–literally. The volunteers will be visiting homes to encourage the parents to get involved at their kids’ schools, in the hope that if they do, test scores and graduation rates will go up.
Many of the volunteer “recruiters” are parents themselves, and have been pounding the pavement since Tuesday. The goal is to reach 40,000 parents before the first day of school.
The city’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, assisted in the training.
Early reports seemed to indicate that parents were open to coming to meetings at school.
