April Draine moved to Northern Kentucky with her husband and three kids in April 2022. It was the second big move her kids had been through in a few years, so Draine was dedicated to being a bridge between her kids and their new schools.
Right away, Draine felt welcomed into the Ryle community, where her oldest went to high school.
She discovered the School Based Decision Making Council, which works to boost student achievement while bringing together parents, teachers and administrators. Draine applied to be the minority representative on the board.
“Within a week, I got an email that says thanks for your interest and you’ve been nominated to be the minority parent to be represented on this board,” she said.
Involvement with the board, Draine said, helped her quickly connect with Principal Matt Schafer and other school leaders.
“Matt Schafer was really welcoming,” she said. “That gave me a lot of ease.”
The school was proactive in its interactions with parents, Draine said, which helped her kids much more quickly assimilate. It also helped her bridge the gaps when they weren’t sure where to go or what to do.
“I’ve tried to find ways to stand in the middle of the bridge” between her kids and their school, Draine said. It can be a challenge even for someone as involved as Draine.
“I’m trying to be bilingual even though we’re both speaking English,” she said.
That’s much easier for all parties when the administration is welcoming and actively works to participate with parents and families. The alternative, which Draine said she has experienced, is when schools are more reactive and parents have to work harder to find out what’s going on.
At her daughter’s school, she said, “they were open for conversations, but I didn’t have as much of an opportunity to work with the school or engage with the principals.”
As LINK worked out how to approach the topic of education for this Super Issue, we knew parents and kids needed to be at the center of those stories.
Northern Kentucky has 13 public school districts, and, while there will always be debate about whether that’s too many, families and leaders alike are tirelessly working to keep public education’s focus where it should be: with the students.
Maybe there are too many schools, or maybe they aren’t the right kind of schools, or maybe some leaders are better than others, but what we’re talking about in this issue is how important it is for parents and schools to create a community, and how that’s happening here in Northern Kentucky.
How schools and parents go about creating that community varies, but Northern Kentucky has lots of examples of how individuals, districts and organizations are helping bridge the gap between parents and school administrators.
One strategy, said EducateNKY President Cheye Calvo, is to think of the relationship as a partnership and for schools to meet parents where they are. “That means shifting from doing to families to doing with them,” Calvo said, “and that begins by recognizing and addressing the power dynamics at play.”
Learn more about the strategies that are helping bring schools and families together here.
In this Super Issue, we are also talking about how families should navigate the way schools are measuring students’ success, and whether it gives an accurate picture of those students’ abilities.
Draine struggles to see her son, who is in the ninth grade this year, get frustrated because he knows the material he is learning in class, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to high test scores.
“He said, ‘I feel like they don’t get to see the full me because it dwindles down to, How did you do on that test,’” Draine said.
Here, learn about how districts across Northern Kentucky measure the success of their students over time, and whether that should change.
We’d be remiss to talk about education without addressing teacher retention.
At the end of the 2022-23 school year, 10.9% of teachers across Kentucky left the profession, 16.7% did not return to teach in the same district and 20% did not return to the same school, according to a statewide staffing shortage report published by the Legislative Research Commission.
Find out what is leading to the exodus, the effect it’s having on students, and what districts are doing to keep their teachers from looking elsewhere here.
Finally, we are diving into early childhood education. Much of the brain’s development happens within the first three years of a child’s life, according to leading neuroscientists, and more than 90% of the brain’s architecture is in place by the time a child is 5. That means a child’s education, local and national experts say, should begin much earlier than when formal education starts, around age 5 in the United States.
Northern Kentucky’s dedication to early childhood education can be seen in programs like Success by Six, a United Way of Greater Cincinnati effort to prepare kids for formal education.
“This region really zeroed in on early learning and early childhood as a focus point over 20 years ago with the emergence of Success by Six, at first in Boone County and then across the region,” Calvo said. “A lot of work was done. This region, in partnership with NKU and United Way, was central to Kentucky having a universal kindergarten readiness screen.”
Here, you can read about more ways educators, parents and nonprofit leaders are finding to try to combat a general lack of kindergarten readiness in our region.
Draine told LINK nky she is grateful her kids landed where they did. While every school is short on resources, she said, it’s the way that leaders react to those shortages that matters.
“And the kids can feel it,” Draine said. “They can tell if you really care or not.”
A perfect example of the kind of leadership Draine is talking about is from 2023, when Boone County was short bus drivers. For four weeks, principal Matt Shafer sat behind the wheel of bus No. 54, taking students to and from school.
“I’m using that to say there could be a lack of resources in a number of ways, but he saw an area that was lacking, he saw how he could fill it, and he did what he could,” Draine said.
And that is what this Super Issue is all about.
