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This article about how Greenwich PTAC wants to advocate for your children from inside your home is scary enough on its own.
But it also appears to be consistent with language seen in Connecticut's 2021 Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) Guidance document: Reimagining Schools to Transform Students’ Lives.
Schools across the state eagerly took ESSER funding in 2021, including Greenwich, which received $10 million to fund social emotional learning and add more social workers, among other priorities.
The overarching goal of ARP ESSER is to transform students’ lives, which requires a commitment to equity. The guidance even says it is “our collective responsibility” to determine priorities using an “equity-focused” lens.
Besides advancing equity in education, one of the state-level priorities for ESSER funding is for “family and community connections”… something which is echoed in the proposed Greenwich PTAC by-laws.
The idea being that school-family-community partnerships “will not only support students” but also “strengthen families and stabilize communities.”
The ESSER guidance suggests drawing on inspiration from an organization called Parent Teacher Home Visits (PTHV) to implement similar home visit programs in Connecticut.
PTHV provides a number of educator resources to support a home visit strategy, including the guide: Home Visits as a Racial Equity Strategy in PreK-12 Education. This particular guide argues for using voluntary home visits to break down racial and other implicit bias, to build families' cultural capacity, and to support equity in education.
We already know that the National PTA has an equity-driven mission, but what about Greenwich PTAC? Does it also consider equity part of its mission?
After all, PTAC does have DEI chairs who report to the First VP, so it seems a reasonable question to ask.
And wouldn’t you like to have a better understanding of PTAC’s proposed objectives in the new by-laws? Especially before the by-laws are voted on this week?
For instance, what are some examples of how PTAC plans on promoting the welfare of children in your home? How will PTAC raise standards of home life? Who determines what “home life” is considered “standard" anyway?
These seem like awfully important things to understand before adopting new by-laws, don’t they?
