You know how important it is for your children to have the education they need and deserve. Sometimes that means leaving a traditional school model and doing the research and the work to find a better solution.
If you’re reading this, you already know how much privilege we have to be able to do that. You had the tools and resources available to you so you could do that. And you understood that it’s within your right to ask for, even demand, something different than a cookie-cutter education model.
I talk about my daughters a lot here, but they truly were the reason behind me starting my micro-school. I was a school administrator, unhappy with the options available to them. I knew how the system worked and though I felt very empowered to speak up and try to get them the education they deserved, I still wasn’t entirely satisfied with the results.
As an education professional, I knew which channels to tap into to get the support my girls needed. But the vast majority of parents don’t know where to turn.
Those same parents are frustrated and they’re tired of watching their children become apathetic toward school because they don’t feel like they fit in.
It’s time that educational leaders and parents empower others to speak out so every child gets the education they deserve, instead of sitting idly back and letting their child get lost in the system.
It’s like wanting to find the root cause of a health issue. You know something isn’t right, so you go to the doctor. Your primary care physician can only do so much so they send you to a specialist. The specialist needs input from a pathologist or imaging specialist. Once you get results back, maybe you go to physical therapy or surgery or some other treatment. And all the while, someone out there is doing research and testing to try to eradicate the issue in the future.
The same thing happens in our traditional education system, but parents are stuck once they bring up the concern to the child’s teacher.
We need to make the process of getting involved and speaking out more streamlined, and we need to educate families about next steps.
At LEADPrep, we help parents navigate through this. But not every family is lucky enough to have a school like LEADPrep in their area.
On a recent podcast episode, Ann Smith of the African Caribbean American Parents of Children with Disabilities talks through what parent empowerment looks like and how incredibly beneficial it is to all parties.
We need more parents as educational advocates if we’re going to make real change happen. And the more they learn, the more comfortable they are with speaking up for their children and for the community as a whole. Ann shares what those resources are and why they’re so incredibly important.
