The Ocean Vista Pre-K staff takes great pride in their Japanese, Spanish and Urdu speaking parents’ level of involvement, as a result of close, daily communication and a variety of involvement options. Parents begin the school year with an orientation at which they receive information and guidance regarding the importance of heritage culture and language, as well as guidelines for supporting their children’s home language and vocabulary development. Regularly scheduled parent meetings offer presentations by community specialists in health and child development to support parents’ care for their children. The Mixteco community is served by multilingual community liaisons as well, to address their unique communication needs. The school secretary, working on her Master’s degree, joins the community liaison to offer a hands-on parent workshop on how to make a parent-child book of alphabet letters, numbers, fruits, and vegetables from magazine clippings, thereby building parents’ capacity to share vocabulary development activities with their children. Celebrations and cooking demonstrations ensure that familiar ethnic foods and holidays are part of each child’s experience at school, including a parent-led origami-making project. Regularly published multilingual parent newsletters keep the entire school community informed about activities at the preschool.
Pre-K children check out a bag of books in their home language each week, specifically for parent-child read-alouds. Parents are supported in learning strategies for sharing books with their children by means of a multilingual video, which explains that parents don’t have to be able to read a book word-for-word in order to share a meaningful literary experience with children. Strategies such as simply discussing the pictures and asking questions builds vocabulary, bonds parents and children and nurtures a child’s interest in learning to read.
In addition to informal involvement opportunities, parent leaders are elected as a decision making board, ensuring that parent voices assume an integral role in the school’s leadership.
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