Thursday night was Parents Evening at Grace's schule (school). As it turned out, this coincided with Liz and Jerry being here, so we had babysitters and both Sue and I could attend.
This was like no other Parents Evening that I had ever attended in Fayetteville (and I assume elsewhere in the US, although I could be wrong about that). First, the participation was incredible. I think 19 of the 21 families were represented with two other families having both parents attend. We barely had enough chairs to sit on!
And the reason that I had some idea of how many families were represented was because we had to have a quorum for the issues that we'd be voting on. That's right, some of the issues were decided by a majority vote and you needed 2/3 of the families represented to make the vote official.
So, what did we vote on? What kind of grades to give (grades from 1-4, with 1=A, or just "comments")? Who would be the parents rep? How much money to collect for the parents fund? Whether to have "ski school" again this year? Should we purchase apples from a local farm so that the kids had fresh fruit (this area has great apples, by the way!)? Where to go on the 4th-grade trip, where the kids go away for a week? Etc. I can't remember them all, but it was interesting to be in such a dynamic. (And if you are interested, the answers, in order: both, with no comments with a 1; 50 euros today; yes!; yes!; a farm where the "city kid" children learn farm chores and how food is produced).
And besides the voting, there were other things. A couple (and Sue can add more). Some children's parents may not be able to afford some activities. But instead of avoiding more costly activities (like ski school!), they setup a fund, out of which all children's fees are taken. What they avoid is collecting money event by event so that no one can really figure out how many parents are contributing (easily, anyway). And speaking of this money ... this teacher, at 8p at night, collected nearly 1,000 euros ($1,400) in an envelope and did what? Put it in a drawer? Took it home? I don't know, but that's a lot of money without any formal accounting. Just can't imagine this in the US at a public school.
Another dynamic that was interesting. This group of teacher and parents have been together for 1st and 2nd grade already (the teacher stays with the same group of kids from 1st through 4th grades). So, she was really frank with the parents. She lectured at length about the importance of reading; both, to encourage kids and to be a good role model by showing kids that parents read. She lectured the parents about being encouraging with their kids as they struggle with more advanced comments. And she even said to one (talkative) parent, "you are just like your son ... you interrupt me all the time!" And all this seemed to be well received.
And I'll close with this. You may be wondering how we could keep up in the meeting. You might have assumed that because this was a bilingual elementary school that the meeting could be conducted in English. Well, no. Not all the parents are comfortable in English. So, the meeting was conducted in German, but the teacher designated two parents to help Sue and I. She tried to position one on each side of us so that they could translate as the meeting progressed (one person didn't make it, but another stepped up to fill the role). Not only did this make the meeting much, much more accessible to us, but it allowed us to connect with a couple of parents, both of which we've contacted since in the hopes of making family connections.
I'm sure I'm missing many of the interesting details in this post, but both Sue and I came away with a much better understanding of how the school operates and presumedly how other public schools operate.
Russ
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