Parents Involvement

1. General approach - the transfer of experiences

Raising parents' interest in the school activities is a top priority of the new program, and the formation component for this issue can become an useful tool for the teaching staff and the school managers in pursuing this objective. This component focuses on the transfer of experiences, thorough knowledge of the good examples being regarded as one effective mode to assist schools in their diligent mission for turning Roma pupils' parents into allies. From this point of view, the previous MATRA program's activities regarding parents' involvement will become the starting point of training sessions ("Parents' Involvement in the Education Process" Guide, training sessions included in the previous program, etc.).

2. Description

The projects accounts for a three-dimensional description: it represents at the same time a declaration of intent, a task and an evaluation criterion for the activities of each particular school. Thus, the program offers a broad framework for the "Parents' Involvement" component. The implementation stage of the school's project is a very complex procedure of converging information, procedural and expert resources available to the teachers' team, and of configuring a significantly better horizon for the target population - the pupils.

The parent status must be earned, and not simply inherited. There can be various successful outcomes in accomplishing, as well as possible, such a performance. Parents' involvement in the school's formation process range from actively taking part in all kinds of activities (curricular, counseling, supporting activities) to passively assisting to occasional school performances. But in most cases, adults are considered resource-individuals in organizing and performing educational activities. Various arguments are invoked to support such an attitude:

• their past educational experience, still present in their memory since most Roma start their familial life very early;
• the necessity to revise and benefit of this experience;
• an increased emphasis on the education's role in shaping the individual's identity;
• the social capital devoted to the school's benefit (financial aid, image promoting initiatives, or any other kind of counseling).

3. Technical assistance

The prerequisite to form a team of the teaching staff, the pupils, the parents, and the authorities of the community in order to acquire consonant educative initiatives can be justified, on one hand, by the tendency to invest parents with the necessary responsibility in supporting their children' future as shaped by the educational system and, on the other, by the attempt to acquire those socializing attributes that local institutions cannot thoroughly and efficiently support (through club houses, handicraft workshops, tourism agencies, etc.). Pragmatically speaking, schools will be granted support in such activities as:

• establishing a Parents Committee ready to take part in elaborating, implementing and monitoring the school development plan;
• identifying the resource-parents / the volunteer parents;
• creating a Counseling Agency for parents;
• raising parents interest in the administrative activities (providing an adequately organized school space, etc.)
• involving parents in the didactic process;
• establishing an open dialogue between parents and the school representatives (the school-head, the teaching staff, etc.) - parents' mail box, meetings, seminaries, cultural-artistic performances, etc.
• initiating training programs for parents, answering parents' expectations regarding school, and their formation demands;
• stimulating parents in children counseling.

4. Activities

The activities stipulated by the school projects for this component follow and elaborate the coordinates mentioned above. Their common ground is the social/community based and the individual relevancy of these activities ("A hygienic life through sanitary education" - Mâinesti-Bals School and School no. 1, Bals-Olt; "How to decrease abandonment among the Roma pupils?" - School no. 6, Alexandria-Teleorman; "Parental rights and responsibilities" - School no. 4, Zimnicea-Teleorman; "Parents training for preventing conflicts" - School no. 16, Ploiesti-Prahova). Faced with major issues of the contemporary world, children and adults play or should play interchangeable roles: questions need not come from child to adult, where the adult is the answers depository. Their meeting is more like a forum of ideas, a privileged place and time for virtually experiencing problematic life-situations, an opportunity for interpersonal, inter-generational and inter-institutional dialogue.

Relevant for parents' involvement component was the network school-heads meeting at Chiliseni where representatives of the Parents Committee were also invited. It was a profitable opportunity for:

• offering interesting comments on various obstacles that block parents' access to their children' educational process: poverty, lack of confidence in studies' utility, Roma families' low educational level, lack of successful examples in the community, etc.
• raising questions on the deficiencies in the local authority policy: cases of lawbreaking regarding the social assistance designated to low income families;
• analyzing the main trends the school could rally to in its attempt to ameliorate difficult cases. Great attention was paid to the significant role the teaching staff has to play for parents and their special training.