Immigrants - Breaking Down Barriers to Get Parents Involved - NYTimes.com: In this era of hovering parents, the principal of Brien McMahon High School noticed one group conspicuously on the sidelines: immigrant parents.
They care very much about their young, but some of them don’t understand the American system, Suzanne Brown Koroshetz discovered last summer when she became McMahon’s principal. She made it a priority to reach out to this sizable community.
At McMahon, one of the three public high schools in Norwalk, about 27 percent of its 1,617 students are Hispanic, officials said, and almost a third come from non-English-speaking homes.
With money from the United Way of Norwalk and Wilton, the Voices of Immigrant Parents Program was formed under Ms. Koroshetz’s stewardship. At twice-monthly meetings, its 14 members developed strategies to help immigrant families navigate their way through the school system. The organization is managed by the Peace Project, a program of the Center for Youth Leadership at McMahon.
A bilingual open house and three evening workshops, all translated into Spanish, and sometimes French for the school’s Haitian families, grew out of those meetings. The first workshop — on academics, report cards and standardized testing — drew nearly 300 parents.
