Walter, it all comes down to education – in this case, parental education. Yup, we, parents, went to classes, training programs and seminars, and then, we came home and shared what we’d learned with our fellow parents. If someone was willing to take a class, we raised the money to cover all their costs. Everyone has different aptitudes, interests, and personal relationships, and once we learned to pool those aptitudes and interests and relationships, we made ourselves strong.
Parents are great, but grandparents have more free time than parents and are happy to help carry the load anyone they can – including babysitting when parents attend classes. Several of our grandparents went to classes themselves and formed the backbone of our parliamentary team.
Our parliamentarian team of parents/grandparents made a big difference. People who knew parliamentary procedure – the rules of public meetings – kept us from getting shoved around, intimidated, and silenced. And darn, were they creative. For example, public officials limit speakers to 3- minutes during public meetings. If you are taking on racism, or bigotry, or presenting a program like the one’s I mentioned, 3-minutes is not nearly enough time. To solve that issue, our parliamentarians broke up our presentations and each person spoke for 3- minutes, then the next person carried on from there until “we” had said everything “we’d” come to say. More than once, whenever one of our parliamentarians tangled with public officials and school district attorneys over some point of order – our parliamentarians always won.
We built a speaker panel of parents who were knowledgeable and could think on their feet. So that everyone could participate, we made darn sure bi-lingual interpreters were always available.
We didn’t just get good people elected to our school board. We made sure our candidates were well trained and knew the job before they ran for office. And then, our parents served as their advisors the entire time they were in office. Parents did research, attended meetings, served on committees, helped analyze data and budgets, networked and did everything they could to help (from babysitting, to making coffee, baking cookies, setting up chairs and tables for meetings and holding fundraisers, etc. and so on and on).
We were careful and never allowed anyone to become a leader, or a spokesperson. And that strategy kept us from getting co-opted or our power diluted. You could get rid of one of us, but there were a couple hundred other parents ready to fill our shoes.
That’s the long way of saying, everywhere in the country, there are training programs available for citizens / parents, who want to make a difference. I attended so many, I ended up doing a lot of training in our community on my own (it’s a strategy known as seeding).
Interestingly enough our parents managed to fight the state and won several huge issues (including opposition to prison expansion). We even changed some laws. As I said, parents have a lot of power, but only when they know how to use it.
Since public officials are not in the business of educating parents or citizens, we, parents, have to educate ourselves.
