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Aiden Veselits

Professor Darragh

EDCI 449

21 April 2024

School, Family, & Community Collaboration Plan

This paper will overview the ways in which I plan to create opportunities for

institutional, family, and community collaboration during my teaching internship and

professional career, both of which will take place at Quincy High School. I will divide this

plan into three parts respectively: community, family, and institutional. Each part will

relay the courses of action I plan to take to promote collaboration with agents who can

aid students in their linguistic, social, or academic development. This plan will be specific

to Quincy School District (QSD) and the surrounding community; I will use actual

resources, educators, and demographics to inform my decisions. It is of the utmost

importance that my future students have access to numerable and varied opportunities

for support from every resource available to them, as their role as learners is impacted far

beyond the classroom.

Community Collaboration

From my experience, Quincy’s community is very supportive and collaborative.

When I lived there, my family and I would always go to fundraisers, community events,

farmer’s markets, etc. Every summer there was this huge fireworks display at a nearby

farm about 10 minutes outside of town, that capped off a week of local vendors, farmers,

and stores selling their goods on Main Street; as well as local programs and businesses
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advertising their services. The entire ordeal was called FCAD, and it seemed no member

of the community was ever absent; each day the streets were lined with people. That is all

to say, the people of Quincy are not isolated or alienated from each other, so it makes it

easy for me as an educator to collaborate with the community as a whole.

FCAD is a great jumping off point to collaborate with the community for the

benefit of students. I could reach out to charity and business organizations that set up

during FCAD to create opportunies for students to get service hours; practice their

English; interact with and support their community; and grow their own student-led

organizations. There was this one student group, MEChA, that fundraised every FCAD by

partnering up with a tamale and fruit stand. It was a great opportunity for them to get the

word out about their club, raise money, and gain community service hours. In my

opinion, every club at QHS should be doing this. Not only does it offer a great way to

advertise, but also to gain community support for the club’s efforts.

Outside of FCAD, I know of a few churches, thrift stores, and food banks that

regularly offer support to students in the community. I could continue this effort by

directing students who I know have food, shelter, or clothing insecurities to the

corresponding service. I would also like to organize a school-wide community day open to

all of the above, so that every student is aware of the resources available to him/her.

There will be some students who I recognize need help in some way, or who directly tell

me themselves, but others may be too anxious to say anything or are simply beyond my

reach. So, I think a community day could work wonders. It would not have to be just to

help students meet their physical needs, either; any business or organization that intends
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to help students in some way could attend. That would include language services,

internships/job opportunities, technical/CTE schools, colleges, military, and much more.

To my knowledge, QHS does not already have an event like this, besides FCAD, which is

entirely community backed and not at all tied to the school district; whereas community

day targets students specifically and takes place in the school.

Lastly, I want to bring back the Scholastic book-fair. When I was a kid going to

school in Quincy, I looked forward to it every year; now, it no longer happens. I believe

that it is a community program because Scholastic, while not specific to Quincy, does aim

to help specific schools and communities. However, it might be better to partner up with

the local library instead and set up a book fair in the high school’s gymnasium. This way,

both the community and the students are being supported. Maybe I could even try to

make a field trip out of it for my class, where we go and everyone picks out one book or

graphic novel, or something else that promotes language/reading, or where they can work

on a research project I have assigned. Ideally, though, the entire school would be

involved. The majority of students at QHS are ELLs, who are usually multiple grade levels

behind in reading, writing, and speaking English. Often, this is because they do not

practice English outside of school, nor do they have constant meaningful interactions

with English, for the sole reason that they do not enjoy reading. A book-fair or library

field trip with teacher and administration backing could offer students opportunities to

find books they truly enjoy, thus becoming more proficient English users both in and out

of the classroom.

Family Collaboration
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From what my mother has told me, effective family collaboration is one of the

most important determiners in a student’s academic success. If parents/guardians do not

know the ways to support their children outside of school, or if they are unaware of what

goes on in the classroom, then they will be at a loss for supporting their academic, social,

and linguistic development. While it is true that many students have involved parents

that attend every parent-teacher conference, PTA meeting, fundraiser, and are otherwise

completely ingrained in their child’s academic life, others are in the dark completely. The

main reason for this is a lack of language support and resources for parents to feel

comfortable attending school related events, or to be in regular contact with teachers.

Many teachers will simply give up in this effort; I for one will not. To start, I would send

out a quarterly report of student progress, along with a weekly newsletter highlighting

classroom activities and student resources, to all parents. This would come in the form of

a physical document sent home with students and an online email sent directly to

parents, to maximize the potential for interaction with it.

Secondly, I believe in actually making an effort to connect with parents on a

personal level. The easiest way to do this would be to set up a school-wide conference at

the beginning of the year, with appropriate translators and language accommodations, so

that I could easily meet all parents right away and start forging a relationship with them.

Obviously, some parents will be unable to attend for one reason or another; so, I would

take the initiative to call said parents for an informal meet-and-greet. For parents to be

involved in their children’s lives, they must first trust me as a responsible and effective

educator who truly cares about students. Even still, some students will not have any
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stable adults in their lives who care about their academic success. While this is a sad

truth, I will do everything in my power to become that stable adult for these select few.

Institutional Collaboration

Institutional collaboration involves working with fellow educators, colleagues, and

administrators to promote student development. Recall earlier when I said that many

teachers feel the obstacles in the way of collaborating with parents are too great to

overcome, so they make no effort in doing so. The onus is on every educator to support

one another in this way. Whether that be offering personal methods to reach out to

parents, or having collaboration sessions to brainstorm ideas that can be used across

grades and departments. A great resource for setting up these sorts of sessions is a

school’s coaching department. At QHS, there are numerous coaches for each subject area

and grade level respectively. I would make it my goal to collaborate with them to set up

professional development sessions to promote collaboration between teachers and

parents. Further, I would implement department-specific (ELL and ELA) meetings to

overview best practices, assessment data, and student progress, as well as the ways to

incorporate language learning across all content areas and classroom activities. Like I

said, the ELL population at QHS is large in proportion to native speakers, so it is

especially important that ELA and ELL teachers collaborate, using hard data as a backing,

to support language needs.

When it comes to administration, I would work with the principal and APs to set

up the book-fair, the library field trip, and community day. Implementing these events

would not be possible without the backing of administrators. Further, I would organize
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student-progress meetings across my department that are somewhat like conferences, but

without parents present. This process could be organized without the aid of

administrators, but I highly doubt it as I would need approval, a time that works for all

content area teachers, and a venue to set this up.

I think meeting with students independently to review portfolios and progress is

important because its more personal to the student; whereas parent-teacher conferences

are more general and less focused on a certain subject area. My elementary and middle

school used to do individual student conferences and I found it very helpful to speak

candidly and privately with my teacher about my academics; I felt less pressured to talk

about my schoolwork when it was just me. I think most students feel somewhat

uncomfortable speaking about their schoolwork with their parents, since there’s often

repercussions at home for performing poorly at school. These meetings would also be a

good opportunity for additional formative assessment in the way of gauging what each

student needs to improve in certain areas, as well as what may be working and not

working across the whole of my teaching practices. So, I could reflect on my own teaching

practices, those of my fellow content teachers (if we meet collectively after these

meetings), and student performance on the individual level. I would implement these

meetings at the half-way and summation of each quarter, so that I could get a good mid-

point gauge on how to adapt future lessons and materials, and then a final meeting to

discern if the process was effective.

Conclusion
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While not a comprehensive list of every way I could create opportunities for

collaboration to promote students’ success, this plan identifies a manageable and feasible

array of collaborative measures I could take during my student teaching and professional

career. Every section of this plan identifies opportunities for collaboration with specific

agents (i.e., community, family, and institution) who have stake in students’ academic,

linguistic, and social development. The opportunities for collaboration listed each

highlight both the course of action and intended effect upon the student population;

ranging from widespread community efforts such as community day, to individual

student collaboration with student-progress meetings. Students need numerable

resources to promote their development as learners and people, and it is our job as

educators to make that fact a reality.