SEOC Accomplishments:
In
our short history as an organization, our achievements have ranged from
positive changes at the school to the district and finally to the state
level.
A Selection of Our Achievements:
At the school level, our members have been able to establish an after-school music program in a Jersey City elementary school and get the Asbury Park high school to implement peer mediation as an alternative to suspension. SEOC parents in Newark and Camden have been able to help their school systems save pieces of land for new school construction when developers were competing for it, as well as cut through red tape to get schools desperately in need of repairs fixed more quickly.
At the district level, SEOC
parents have been able to obtain greater transparency of Board of
Education decision-making in Jersey City and Asbury Park, so
accountability is strengthened. Through our current campaign in
Jersey City, our members got the district to test all of the schools
for lead in the drinking water, inform parents of the results, and
replace the contaminated water sources.
SEOC
members in Newark successfully led a campaign to get special needs
students returned to their home sub-districts, with their academic
programs intact, ending the practice of keeping some special needs
students on the school bus for up to an hour and half at a time. Also in Newark, parents have increased
their children’s
safety by getting the the district to fill ten empty crossing guard
posts and promise to fill another twenty empty ones by next year.
Meanwhile, SEOC
parents in Asbury Park conducted a successful, year-long campaign to
get the district to
re-write its discipline policy to provide more alternatives to
suspension. Asbury Park
members also obtained a busing
program to safely transport elementary students across town when one of
the schools shut down due to a ceiling falling
in.
At the state level, SEOC
parents’ research and actions have made many parents as well as
education officials aware of major deficiencies in the implementation
of the state’s “parent involvement” mandates. SEOC’s prodding of
the
NJ School Construction Corporation (now the School Development
Authority) resulted in sped up school repairs in Newark, Camden,
Plainfield, and other districts.
Realizing that winning changes in statewide policies
requires working in broad coalitions, SEOC has made sure that
parents and community members are a key part of several coalitions
working to maintain New Jersey’s historic state mandates for quality
and sufficient school programs, buildings, and funding, in the face of
forces trying to chip them away. Thus SEOC is a core member of
the NJ Education Organizing Collaborative (building grassroots
constituencies in Newark, Paterson and Jersey City); Our
Children/Our Schools (uniting with others around school funding
policies); and Build Our Children’s Future (continuing to advocate
for high quality public school facilities for all).
Among our long-term coalition partners are the
Education Law Center of NJ, the Abbott Leadership
Institute, and the Paterson Education Fund. SEOC is also
very frequently working together with the NAACP, NJ ACORN,
the Hispanic Directors Association and others concerned with
education reform for New Jersey’s urban and low-income public school
children.
Finally, SEOC is part of a national network of
education reform organizing initiatives: Communities for Public
Education Reform (CPER). CPER provides us with major
funding, as well as leadership and staff learning opportunities through
annual gatherings of parent and community leaders working
for public school change in Denver, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
These achievements and others have been the result
of committed and persistent parents leading strategic, and in some
cases long-lasting, campaigns. In addition to our concrete
accomplishments, we value the overall achievement of building strong
and united parent groups – our SEOC Chapters -- in each school
district. Grassroots membership recruitment and leadership
development are therefore central to all our work. This is the
foundation that will enable us to go beyond our current accomplishments
to achieve much more in the years to come, as we develop our membership
and leadership in numbers and skill and we develop more, and more
ambitious, campaigns
SEOC-Newark
One Newark Education Coalition (ONEC)
Recent Accomplishments:
The Special Needs Committee:
*Special needs students were spending up to an hour and a half on the
bus on the way to school due to poor planning by the district and
moving of special needs students out of their neighboring
schools. As a result of the committee's work and meetings with
school officials, more than half the students are now being returned to
their neighborhood schools while still maintaining their required
academic program. Most of the other students will be returned in
2009.
*Parents also found some deplorable conditions on the school bus that
they were worried their children would not have the capacity to deal
with. To begin to address this, the committee developed a form
for parents to monitor the condition of school buses, as well as the
behavior of drivers and aides. This will continue to be
documented in the fall. The data then will be shared and changes
made as necessary with the Newark Public Schools Department of
Transportation.
The
School Safety Committee:
*This committee addresses the lack of crossing and security
guards as well as other safety issues in the schools.
*Parents on this committee identified 30 crossing guard posts that
needed to be filled and met with district officials about this
concern. As a result, 10 new crossing guards have been hired; the
committee's goals is to see the other 20 posts filled by September
2008.
*The committee will be paying close attention to the budget and
spending of the Newark Public School Safety Grants to make sure all of
the money goes towards helping to keep all children safer.
The School Construction Committee:
*This committee was part of the
successful push to get the state senate to pass the Rice-Turner Bill,
which will allocate $3.25 billion for school construction.
Further, the committee has met with several top officials to make it
clear that more money than this is needed to complete all of the
schools on the waiting list across the state.
*The
committee has focused on Harriet Tubman School, where several of the
committee members have children, in order to highlight the school
construction needs at this school in particular. The team got
over 1,000 fellow community members to write and sign letters to their
legislators urging them to keep school construction, and Harriet
Tubman, near the top of the priority list.
The Healthy Food Committee:
*This committee was just formed in response to a very common complaint
from parents and students. The parents on this committee are
working to develop a mechanism for parents and students to express
concerns about the type and condition of the food served in the school,
in keeping with the national and state requirements. If remedies
cannot be worked out at the local level, they will bring the
documentation to the district, and as necessary, to the state
level.
SEOC-Jersey City
Parents and Communities United for
Education (PCUE)
PCUE
was just founded as the Jersey City chapter of SEOC one year ago.
The members have already accomplished a great deal!
*When 6 schools tested for unsafe levels of lead in the drinking water, the district did not go public with the information until 18 months later, when national news sources publicized the information. Lead is particularly dangerous in children, where it can lead to cognitive development problems. PCUE successfully campaigned to get the district to test the rest of the schools' water for lead, mail results to the homes of parents in English and Spanish, shut off the contaminated sources while placing water coolers in the affected schools, and develop a remediation plan.
*PCUE is making a name for itself across the city! The
campaign has been covered extensively by several news sources.
Check out the news coverage on the PCUE blogspot!
PCUE blogspot:
http://www.pcueforhealthyschool
SEOC-Asbury Park
Asbury Park Parent Listening Project
(AP-PLP)
Recent Accomplishments:
*Successful campaign to get cross-town school buses when Bangs ES
ceiling fell in and school closed; rally of 120 (covered by Asbury Park
Press); Results: over 400 elementary school children were transported
safely to their alternative schools throughout the year
*Creation of after-school programming brochure and dissemination to
community; successful pressure on city, school system, and local
non-profit to create similar brochures and spread through their
networks
*Getting the district to make urgently needed repairs in dilapidated
parts of the Middle School building
*Discipline Policy and Parent Contacting Campaign:
This campaign is to respond to the extraodinarily high levels of
suspension in Asbury Park and the lack of alternative disciplinary
approaches. In 2006, 36% of students in the Middle School were
suspended at least once, 78% of students in the High School, and 33% of
students in one of the elementary schools. No other district we
could find, including Newark, Jersey City, and Paterson, came anywhere
close to these figures.
In addition, this campaign responds to the lack of home contacting in
key situations, such as when students are absent, failing, or
disciplined, where better communication with parents can prevent
resulting crises.
*The APPLP members have gotten the district to include finding
alternatives to suspensions and reducing suspensions in its annual plan
for the coming
year. As a result of APPLP's year-long campaign, the district
finally formed a committee to re-write the discipline policy.
*At the persistent urging of the APPLP members, the district finally
promised to get an automatic home-calling machine this calendar year,
making parent-contacting in key situations easier and more likely.
School-Level Achievements:
*Got the HS to establish a peer mediation program as
an alternative to suspension
*Obtained promises from HS principal to prioritize
counseling of troubled students and to make In-School-Suspension a
place of learning
*Obtained promises from HS principal to prioritize
parent contacting, update school's emergency home contact list, ask
about parent contacting in his teacher evaluations, and collect his
teacher's parent contacting logs
*Effectively stopped Alternative Middle School plans
to take students on frequent trips to Monmouth Juvenile Jail
*Obtained promise from Bradley ES principal to
clarify school administrators' parent contacting roles, especially in
cases of suspension
*As a result of our work, we got Bradley ES and
district administrators to pledge to lower the school's suspension rate
and find alternatives to suspension
SEOC-Paterson
This chaper was just founded this spring. So far, we have hired a
wonderful and experienced organizer, Fernando Martinez, to help get the
chapter off the ground. We look foward to great things coming out
of Paterson!