Leadership Project Analysis & Narrative

Because for so many years I have acted as a union shop steward at my site, UCLA Community School, I have not made much room to grow my leadership skills outside of labor organizing. As such, this leadership project really challenged me to step outside my comfort zone and grow my confidence tackling issues related to supporting underserved, and marginalized students. For the last two years, I have had an atypically large proportion of students qualifying for Individualized Education Plans (IEP. Currently more than 50% of my kindergarten and first grade general education class  has an (IEP) and five of those students have been identified as Autistic. Personally, I did not feel at all prepared by my school or district to be able to appropriately provide instruction to this group of students. This situation led me to feel that teachers, families and other school staff are not adequately prepared to understand and support neurodivergent students with ADHD,  Autism and SLDs (specific learning disabilities). This is a problem because that lack of preparation has an impact not just on the identified students but those in general education too. 

To discuss and tackle this problem I assembled a reciprocal learning partnership leadership team made up of the following members: the Resource Specialist Teacher (RSP)) in charge of my students minutes; the Assistant Principal, Elementary Instructional Specialist (APEIS) at my school; and my Teacher Assistant (TA) who is an alum of our K-12 school and recent UCI graduate. The team later grew to include one our school’s Psychiatric Social Workers (PW) as well. Ultimately our Cycle 1  discussion led us to identify an equity issue at our school: We need to do better to foster and promote community building among working class parents raising nuero-divergent children. Unfortunately during Cycle 2, APEIS on my team was reassigned to another school. Moreover, the RSP teacher and PSW also on my team, alongside 12 other members of our school’s staff, found out that their positions were in danger of being eliminated due to new district policy on carry-over funding and other budget cuts. These budget changes ultimately forced our school to cut three RSP positions, effectively putting the students serviced by our special education program even more at risk and also threatening all the progress our school has made to establish an Inclusion Model at our school. This unexpected situation forced the project to change course towards creating and fostering parent involvement to organize against the parents cuts. Ultimately, this whole process revealed to the leadership team and I the general need to create a third space for parents at schools, where they could build community, share resources with each other, and build community. 

To address the identified equity issues, the leadership team engaged in teacher surveys,  parent interviews, general school data collection, resource creation for teachers with students with IEPs, a parent townhall to discuss budget cuts, and also the creation of a parent support group. Going into this project, my anticipated short term goal was to create more dialogue and collaboration with other educators at my school in order to explore ways to improve the experiences of special education students and their families. Now that many months have passed since this RLP team began to dialogue, a long term outcome that has emerged from the leadership project is the establishment of a parent support group at our school that we hope will eventually be parent led and organized. In order to execute this project, I helped to facilitate the initial RLP meetings but towards the end other members also engaged in co-facilitation so that our effort felt collectively led. My role listening to others during our conversations forced me to become better at recognizing emerging patterns and synthesizing the thoughts of the members  group so we could concretize our ideas and turn them into actions.

Initially, the information the leadership team collected for Cycle 1 of this RLP was very broadly focused on Autism Spectrum Disorder. The APEIS worked to compile information on the number of families at our school with ASD as well as sharing that as student age, comorbidities like SLDs (specific learning disabilities), ADHD and ADD are found to impact them more so those end up becoming the focus of their IEPs. The RSP teacher compiled research on Autism eligibility for IEPs in order to consolidate facts that would be useful to both parents and educators. My TA and I developed questions to interview parents who have students identified as having ASD. Our positionalities helped us be more thoughtful about the way we crafted questions for largely Latino Parents at our school. We also last minute created a teacher survey to collect information on teacher professional development experiences with Autism. Coming back together to  discuss the information we gathered helped the  group narrow down our focus. Our work to learn more about the equity issue facing families, and teachers of ASD students , helped us realize that we need to foster and promote community building among working class parents raising nuero-divergent children. These parents tend not to know how to disclose this important aspect of their child's identity to them. This leaves these children powerless when it comes to understanding this important aspect of their identity. These parents also sometimes lack social networks and access to resources to better understand ADS. We came to the conclusion that encouraging open communication amongst families about autism could be a way to empower autistic students. 

For Cycle 2, the problem we sought to discuss and break down was disconnection and alienation of parents of special needs at our school. During this time, our school received the news that the special Ed program at our K-12 Span School is endangered due to budget cuts. This reoriented temporarily the direction of my leadership project, since now the majority of the members of the group were told their positions were likely going to be cut going for the next school year. The whole school came together to dialogue and create a plan to fight against the budget cuts. We acted swiftly by organizing morning leaflettings to pass information on the budget cuts and facilitated a parent meeting after school to connect with parents in person. We pulled off this meeting in quite a short amount by meeting at lunch to dialogue around budget cuts and democratically decide how we all could help. 

While this was one way the leadership team helped to bring in parents to begin to build community, it was not the original intention of the project. This moment of crisis taught me that leaders need to be flexible and ready to reorient projects when new priorities emerge.  Because I still wanted to explore the parent alienation amongst families with special education, I decided to start meeting with the PSW and my TA. After organizing against the budget cuts, we realized that there are no  parent-led groups at our school and this means every time we have a crisis,  our school has to start from scratch to engage and organize parents. As such, the new iteration of the leadership team decided to learn more about parent-led support groups in schools for the rest of the RLP Cycle 2. By this point, the RLP group consisted of the PSW and me. Through dialoguing with one another we realized families at our school ​​are in need of informal spaces to build community and share resources. Evidence of the need was supported by the PSW’s observation of poor parent attendance at events like coffee with the principle. She also observed a divide between families of newcomers and more established immigrant families. At faculty meetings, I made note of a comment the principal said that families at our school desire more social opportunities to interact with other parents. This same sentiment was expressed to me after the parent meeting by two mothers in attendance. They expressed dissatisfaction with post pandemic parent involvement and expressed a desire for more parent engagement from the school.

These informal observations and conversations inspired the PSW and I to discuss the possibility of starting a parent support group at our school open to all. After many meetings we decided to establish a parent support group that could gather multiple times a year. We held our first meeting April 16 afterschool and had 5 parents in attendance. Our intention is for the group to eventually be  parent led and organized, but we are working together to support its launch. We  hope that this becomes a space that  empowers parents to build community, share resources, and learn together. We believe that this will strengthen our community school and as result benefit students overall wellness since studies have proven time and time again the relationship between parent engagement and educational outcomes for students.

In implementing the co-constructed equity actions in the RLP, i.e. a parent budget cuts townhall and one parent support group, childcare is often an obstacle for engaging and involving parents in schools. While both of the events organized by the leadership team included child-care, ensuring it on a consistent basis is definitely a challenge when events are after school. When engaging parents, other languages spoken at the school is another factor requiring consideration. For example, while the majority of families at our school are Spanish Speaking, some are not and this is a factor we need to consider when planning parent programming. Though we advertised the parent meetings through the school bulletin, both events could have been better attended. A change I would like to make in terms of implementation of a parents support group is to begin this work more informally. A lot of parents linger after school and enjoy talking with other adults on campus. There is an opportunity for informal engagement with families here. Before the first parent meeting, our team could have maybe spent some time conversing and getting to know the families that linger at school. Then we could have actively recruited these families to attend the budget cuts meeting and the  parent support group. Being attuned to times when parents are hanging out and actively connecting with them as staff is also an important part of parental engagement. 

As mentioned above, the co-constructed equity actions and my own ideas changed a lot as a result of implementation. The focus on autistic students  that initially inspired the RLP shifted as a result of the various dialogues and events that transpired this school year.  I was originally myopically focused on families with autistic children navigating school systems, namely  because of the unique makeup of my class. With the budget crisis at my school going on, I really did not know how to approach engaging in the original purpose of the RLP. After many conversations with the PSW, I came to realize that creating a more general parent support group would still allow parents to connect to one another at many intersecting aspects of their identities. In the end, I really had to humble myself and step back to consider what our school really needed in terms of parent engagement. 

In implementing this RLP, I definitely faced many limitations largely related to the budget cuts crisis at my school. This year was a very challenging one. After coming back from winter break, our school found out the district was assigning our APEIS to be at an additional school which meant she would have to split her time with us. Later, we found out that the district was cutting about 200 admin positions and as someone with low seniority, our APEIS would be getting displaced. This was compounded by the news that budget cuts would be severely impacting our school. At first it was speculated that 16 positions would be lost, including 3 Resource Teachers. For a few months one of the other participants of my Q1 RLP, RSP teacher Sharon Figueroa,  was told she would probably get displaced. The 2nd PSW who I started working on the RLP with also found out her position was in danger during this quarter. Fortunately, our school found money to fund her position and thankfully we were able to continue having conversations for this leadership project

The initial orientation of this leadership project was focused on special education students and their families. As a result of the various conversations we had as a group, over time we came to the realization that working class immigrant parents of students in the special education program are alienated from each other and would benefit from building community with one another over their shared experiences. Our different positionalities definitely impacted the ultimate direction of our work. 

My position as an educated, single and  childless woman raised by financially stable immigrant home owning parents  I admit can be an obstacle in my fully understanding the experiences of the working class immigrant families at my school. The experience of learning to work with autistic children of working class and immigrant backgrounds has humbled me but also motivated me to learn more about this special group and the obstacles they face. Conducting parent interviews helped me and the leadership team realize how atomized families navigating the special education system are. The positionality of the other members of the team were instrumental to reaching this realization. The RSP Teacher,  a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, is  autistic, was raised in our school neighborhood, and is an alum of RFK Community schools, the site of our campus. Her positionality helped the group to comprehend that many parents in our school don’t know how to have conversations with their children about autism. The APEIS is a special education educator and parent. Through her lens, she was able to help us see the way parents with more social capital and financial capital are able to seek out resources in ways working class parents in our community are not.  My TA, a recent college graduate and alum from our school, grew up in Koreatown. His familiarity with the culture of our community and experiences as an uncle to a child with autism helped him further illuminate the lack of resources parents in our school have when it comes to supporting their neurodivergent students. Lastly, The PSW experiences working with the regional center taught her that parents, especially marginalized ones, especially need help advocating for themselves and their child. Her experiences in social work and connecting with families at our school, helped the group realize there was a general need for parent engagement amongst all kinds of families. Before joining the group, she was already  exploring the idea of starting a parent support group for newly arrived parents since this population is growing at our school. As a result of our conversations on this equity issue and positionality, the group came to agree that creating a more general parent support group could still allow parents to connect to one another at various intersecting aspects of their identities.

This leadership project took on what I would consider “many lives.” When the members of the RLP informed me that their positions were under threat, my positionality as a labor organizer influenced the next moves of this group. I quickly realized that many of the equity issues we were discussing could not ever be addressed without having a fully staffed special ed program and more psychiatric support for students.

As a result of this leadership project, I have become better and more confident at facilitating meetings for adult groups. I have gained experiences collaborating with other teachers on projects related to school operations. The Reciprocal Learning Partnership Inquiry Cycles were an extremely helpful tool for learning to be a leader that listens to others and takes into account that there are multiple ways of understanding equity issues.  The method for facilitating these discussions also taught me that it is ineffective to approach an equity issue as an individual and that it is important to include other stakeholders, with various positionalities, in order to see a situation as clearly as possible. Taking to reflect after each cycle was also an important process that helped me contribute to developing a quality project. Often at work and in political organizing we seldom make time to really reflect on projects to improve or make them more inclusive, especially if we are caught up in a timeline. Through reflection, I was able to understand that there was a general need for informal spaces that engage parents in building.

Sociocultural Learning theory influenced the way my project developed because it can be applied in a variety of ways in a school. While the initial inquiry of my leadership project was first focused on neuro-divertent students, it came to focus on the experiences of parents. Learning that many parents long for more opportunities to interact with other parents helped us come to the conclusion that parents need spaces in schools to develop their own communities of practices. Parents are vital stakeholders of a school community and should also feel a sense of ownership when it comes to school affairs. How can this happen if we don’t allow parents to utilize school spaces and practice leadership.  Au, Gavelek et.al., emphasize that “learning emerges from…interactions with others.” Approaching parents organizing with an asset based lens, genuinely believing that everyone at a school can learn from each other is part of building a healthy democratic culture. 

As I school leader, I plan to lead the work for equity, social and racial justice work by cultivating spaces for stakeholders to dialogue, to reflect and feel safe to critique current school practices. The Reciprocal Learning Partnership protocol is an amazing tool that lets participants fully explain their ideas and how their positionality informs the way  they think. Before, my instinct might have been to quickly arrive at a solution. I realize now that it is important to include others in leadership because my own point of view and positionality is not sufficient for being able to completely understand an equity issue.