This week a Salt Lake City elementary school made nationwide news
when several dozen children who were given a school lunch were then
humiliated by having it taken away and thrown in the garbage. The
problem was not with the food or the kids. From the school
administrator's perspective, it was the necessary response to those
children's parents’ failure to maintain their lunch accounts.
And failure there most
unquestionably was. The event represented a failure of management since
the effort to alert parents about accounts was late and not fully successful. It represented a failure of policy since it’s doubtful that the cost of subsidizing a few lunches outweighs the cost of having hungry children in school.
Finally, it represented a very serious failure of basic human empathy
because what kind of person doesn’t recognize the shame and waste
involved with publicly taking and throwing away children’s lunches?
While the specific outcomes in this case are uncertain, it happens to point to a pervasive problem across the U.S. education system. The nation’s 12,880 school
districts have yet to collectively figure out a successful method for
regular all-parent communication. In a period with so much change and
year-to-year difference across curricula, learning interventions and software,
there is really quite a bit of material for two-way communication and
yet regular parent communication still often happens through notes in
backpacks. Despite the need for good communication, less than half of those surveyed about
their experiences with traditional public schools report being “very
satisfied” with the way their school communicates with parents.
and:
This area is a ripe one for civic hacking: the creative use of technology to solve civic problems. Volunteer groups like Code for America brigades work to find ways to use technology to — among other things — solve problems of communication between government and hard to reach populations. Code for America in San Mateo, Calif., worked specifically on the problem of improving coordination among food safety net providers and the people they serve.
No comments:
Post a Comment
If your comment does not appear in 24 hours, please send your comment directly to our e-mail address:
parentscoalitionmc AT outlook.com