At Guilford Preparatory Academy, a Okay-8, Title 1 public constitution faculty in Greensboro, North Carolina, our college students and households convey a wealthy mixture of resilience, tradition and dedication. Being a Title 1 faculty means a few of our households face limitations in know-how entry, time and tutorial assets for college students. However that has by no means outlined us. What defines us is how we preserve exhibiting up for each other with love, creativity and power.
When the pandemic hit, our world modified in a single day. Our PTA paused its occasions, applications had been canceled and the connection between faculty and residential began to fade. Because the know-how trainer, director of know-how and the PTA mother or father trainer liaison, I used to be in the course of that hole the place know-how and household engagement had been wanted. I turned the go-between for lecturers and households. I listened. I shared. I stood within the area between what was lacking and what we would have liked to rebuild.
I requested myself, “How can we make faculties really feel like locations the place households belong? And the way can know-how assist us open that door?”
That’s the place Jaguar Jam got here in. Launched within the spring of 2023, PTA president Shanita Swann believed this occasion may very well be the proper alternative to convey households again into the center of the college whereas honoring and celebrating our lecturers after the challenges of the pandemic. She needed to carry spirits, rebuild household relationships and remind our workers that they had been seen, valued and never alone. We determined to make use of know-how to assist convey that imaginative and prescient to life and reconnect our faculty group in a significant means.
By way of Jaguar Jam, I watched know-how grow to be greater than a classroom software. It turned the best way we saved relationships and the college group alive.
On the day of Jaguar Jam, the college comes alive with stations and areas that commemorate studying, connection and pleasure. Lecture rooms, hallways and outside areas are reworked into interactive zones the place households can discover, take part and develop collectively. From creating digital sign-ups to sending out stay updates and sharing gratitude posts via faculty communication instruments, we made it straightforward for households to affix in from wherever they had been.
Our gymnasium reworked into an area stuffed with power and creativity. Vendor tables line the partitions of the room; a number of had been run by native companies, however the ones that drew essentially the most consideration had been led by our personal college students. I finished by one desk the place a center faculty scholar proudly offered telephone instances she designed utilizing digital know-how instruments. She smiled extensively and stated, “I made this!” Her mom stood beside her, not simply watching, however beaming with pleasure and pleasure. At one other desk, a fifth grader spins cotton sweet from her personal machine. She explains how she tracks every sale utilizing a budgeting app she realized in know-how class.
Down the hallway, the “Prepared, Tech, Go” session is in movement. Twenty-five households obtain free laptops together with teaching on easy methods to assist studying at dwelling. Throughout this session, mother and father ask easy methods to entry their college students’ homework portals, studying apps and digital school rooms.
Within the know-how classroom, I visited a resume workshop. Dad and mom sit at desktops offered by the college, studying easy methods to create resumes, construct digital profiles and navigate job platforms. The room buzzes with discovery as mother and father lean over screens, ask questions and share small victories with each other. Since this workshop, six mother and father have secured full-time jobs. One mother or father who stated {that a} previous mistake would preserve her from ever discovering steady work now holds the highest-paying job of her life.
All of our lecturers and trainer assistants participated in full, not as workers members working an occasion, however as group members invested in each household who walked via our doorways. Our college board members joined us all through the occasion, greeting households and exhibiting up with assist.
Know-how helped rework Jaguar Jam into greater than only a celebration or a fundraiser. It was one of many first steps in rebuilding belief and connection between lecturers, college students and households after the pandemic. Over the course of sooner or later, know-how that was as soon as considered as intimidating empowered households and college students to confidently step into digital studying. It reminded our households that we’re on this collectively.
Jaguar Jam is a technique and a mannequin for a way Title 1 faculties — and different faculties, basically — can use know-how to shift tradition by inviting households into the college’s heartbeat.
We can not change outcomes with out altering how faculties see household engagement. Household engagement shouldn’t be a program; it’s a promise. It’s how we construct belief, present respect and preserve the door open for each mother or father, guardian and caregiver to take their place in a toddler’s studying journey. Know-how helps us attain households the place they’re and rejoice college students in ways in which journey past the classroom partitions. When households are absolutely seen, absolutely valued and absolutely linked, faculties don’t simply enhance. They rework.
