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Mandate for parent involvement just won't do it
Published on Tuesday, Apr 15, 2008
Magicians wave a wand, and things happen. Lawmakers? They brandish bills and hope something will happen. Not enough parents participating in their children's schools? Why, wave a bill at it. There's gotta be a law to match all of life's nagging problems.
That's part of the problem with the bill state Rep. Sandra Williams, a Cleveland Democrat, introduced in the Ohio House last month. The legislation would require a parent with a child in a public school to volunteer at least 13 hours a year (hold your horses for the moment on the notion of mandatory volunteers).
The legislation, House Bill 519, would require school districts to report participation to the Ohio Department of Education. The penalty for parents who don't put in the required hours would be a $100 fine — unless they can prove to their local school board they truly can't make time to volunteer. The bill would permit employers a nonrefundable credit on the corporate franchise or commercial activities taxes if they choose to grant employees paid time off to volunteer.
The good elements in Williams' bill — and there are several — deserve to be commended. For a start, there is a solid research base for wanting to engage parents. The interest to do something about it is thus a major plus.
Studies have established that one of the most effective ways parents can help their children do well in school is to be active participants in some capacity in the learning process. The parents' own attitudes to school and to new learning, their expectations of and interest in what their students are doing in school, their relationships with school personnel and household routines (mealtimes, bed times, leisure activities) that signal the importance the family places on school work all influence the degree of involvement.
Important to recognize, too, is that getting sufficient numbers of parent volunteers is one of the abiding frustrations schools encounter. In some buildings, parent-conference days can be among the loneliest on the school calendar for teachers. If parents showed half the enthusiasm for helping out with math and reading as they do for ball games, there would be fewer schools scraping bottom on achievement tests and more students graduating from high school.
None of this is to say HB 519 is a solution at all to raising, let alone sustaining, volunteering among parents. The bill would raise more problems than it would solve.
The obvious concern is that working parents have a tough enough time juggling work and meeting basic household needs. Thirteen hours a year doesn't sound like a huge imposition, but who's to say which parent can afford 13 hours from work?
The bill didn't dare impose a mandate on employers to offer paid time off for parent volunteers but left it to employers' discretion. The burden of the volunteer mandate thus would fall unfairly on those parents who have the misfortune to work for employers who choose not to grant paid time off.
Besides, do we really want some parents in school buildings, closer than a 1,000 feet of separation, serving as mentors, chaperones, teachers' aides or whatever? One section of the bill calls for background checks, but that would apply only to volunteers who join the mentoring programs that districts would be required to create. There appears to be no provision to screen out unsavory characters in the run-of-the-mill volunteer program.
Equally troublesome are the extra obligations a mandate like this would entail. To report to the education department, somebody will have to keep track of volunteer hours for thousands of parents who may put in an hour here and there in the course of a school year. The accuracy of records will be crucial, as the bill threatens to take the fine out of the income-tax refunds of noncompliant parents.
Never mind who will pick up the cost for the paperwork. Nobody can recount like the Cleveland school district the trouble it has seen reporting accurately its record of student enrollment. Imagine adding parent records, too.
Rep. Williams concedes her goal at this stage is to get a good discussion going on what needs to be done to get parents to volunteer. So while we are discussing, other sticky points will need more than passing attention: Does each parent in a two-parent family owe a 13-hour obligation? What about those with more than one child? Do they serve 13 hours per child? And what happens with the growing number of grandparents in their second round of parenthood? Do they get a break?
Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by e-mail at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com
Magicians wave a wand, and things happen. Lawmakers? They brandish bills and hope something will happen. Not enough parents participating in their children's schools? Why, wave a bill at it. There's gotta be a law to match all of life's nagging problems.
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