Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Let me qualify my previous post by saying that when I wrote it I was thinking of high school students, who as young adults do bear their share of the responsibility for getting the help that's there. And they do know about it. For elementary and middle schoolers, of course, a lot more depends upon the parents knowing about what services are available, and we don't always do an adequate job of communicating with them. Back to high school, certainly our methods of disseminating information to parents can be improved as well. For one, with parents of English Language Learners, who need the information in the home language. And as for the general population, how do we usually send correspondence to the parents? By passing out letters to the students in school. Of course, the school custodian can tell you what happens to most of those. Yet, even after we do improve on our communication with the parents, at the high school level, the number of students taking advantage of the available help may not increase by much. Not to say we shouldn't put forth the effort to inform them properly. 7:38:53 AM    comment []