Description
The literature promotes parent involvement as a vital resource for a child's success in education but this resource is often under-utilized due to parents and teachers failing to establish a relationship of trust and collaboration for the benefit of the student. The purpose of this study is to add to existing research in regards to a parent's perception of the quality of their child's education and their perceptions of the relationships with their child's educators. The goal is to ascertain whether collaborative relationships between parents and school staff can assist students in generalizing their education beyond the walls of the classroom. Participants of the Parental Readiness and Empowerment Program (PREP) will be evaluated to obtain information on parental involvement, collaboration with school staff and satisfaction with their child's education. PREP is an educational program designed for low-income families to teach parents educational rights and assist them in advocating for their child in school. For the purposes of this study participants will be solely from PREP and not the general population to control for the curriculum taught specifically to low-income parents in self-efficacy and collaboration. The intention of this analysis is to answer the questions: Does the Parental Readiness and Empowerment Program (PREP) change Parent-Educator relationship? Does the PREP change Parent perceptions of the quality of their child's education? Are changes in the parent perceptions of the relationship related to the perceptions of quality of their child's education? The objective is to test the hypothesis that knowledge from PREP helps parents build collaborative relationships that are recursive. Surveys were distributed and evaluated prior to PREP trainings and following the completion of the each workshop to analyze if an improvement in relationships with school staff was obtained and if this increase resulted in a preferment in positive parent perception of the quality of the student's education or if the opposite was true.
