OneVille is hosting an event for Somerville online media makers on Thursday, July 22nd from 6:30-8:30pm at Design Annex in Union Square (60-70 Union Square, above Precinct). The goal is to discuss how to work together to make sure information that supports kids and families reaches everyone who wants it. Snacks and refreshments will be provided. If you are interested in attending or would like more information, visit the event info page or contact us at onevilleproject@gmail.com. You can also call or text us at 617-299-9308.
May 27, 2010
Future of the Healey: frequently asked questions and their answers
The OneVille project has been supporting dialogue about the future of the Healey School in Somerville. Many Healey parents have told us that they quickly need some basic questions about their school answered before they can really talk about the future of the school.
In the spirit of improving communications between school and home, we gathered questions that parents had asked at our forums. We brought the questions to Mr. Sabin, the principal of the Healey School, at a recent Multilingual Coffee Hour and taped the conversation with participants’ permission, so we could share the information with other parents.
We have the responses from Mr. Sabin, along with some other voices of parents discussing the same issues at other parent dialogues attended by or sponsored by OneVille. We hope this helps. View the document to read the frequently asked questions about the future of the Healey.
Questions asked and answered include:
- What are the four programs at the Healey?
- What IS the difference between the four programs?
- Is there a different kind of TEACHING in the Choice program than the Neighborhood program?
- When they get to middle school, how does it work? Do the Neighborhood or Choice kids seem to have had a different education from one another?
- Why did most of the Choice program children leave the school before 7th and 8th grade, before this past year?
- Enrollment: What’s the process for getting admitted to the Choice program?
- Field Trips: Several parents raised issues of field trips that end up being mostly Choice or Choice-only – local field trips and particularly, Nature’s Classroom. Is the invitation to “Neighborhood” extended and rejected? Not extended?
- What is the process of determining the Healey’s future?
Learn more about the future of the Healey School: Read the FAQs document.
(click to open the document)
(click to open the document)
May 27, 2010
School Committee Timeline for Future of Healey School
The OneVille Project is testing ways to communicate information to all necessary players in kids’ lives.
This is a copy of the public document distributed by the school committee listing the timeline about the decision-making process about the future of the Healey School.
Monday, May 24, 6:30 PM at Healey School Cafetorium:
- School Committee Long Range Planning meeting
Presentation of the three options to the School Committee from instructional and organizational points of view. Updates from Healey School groups. Discussion groups facilitated by School Committee members to hear from the public.
Tuesday June 1, 6:30 PM at Healey School Cafetorium:
- Public hearing on the Future of the Healey School
Speak your mind! Read the flyer to learn how you can share your voice and be heard. (click to open the document)
Superintendent makes his recommendation to the School Committee, followed by questions and discussion by School Committee. Any member of the public who wishes to speak will have an opportunity to do so. Each speaker will be given a maximum of two minutes. (No elementary school students will be permitted to speak.)
Monday, June 21 (or Wednesday June 23):
- School Committee Long Range Planning meeting to discuss the future of the Healey School.
Monday, June 28:
- Final scheduled School Committee meeting of 2009-2010 school year
Wednesday, June 30:
- Deadline for School Committee decision on the future of the Healey School
May 25, 2010
Bringing families together at reading night
The OneVille Project is working to support people in Somerville kids’ lives to communicate and collaborate about strategies for student success. One of our pilot efforts is to hold academic family events where parents and young people get together to share strategies for improving kids’ learning.
In monthly Reading Nights we’ve held at the Healey School in Somerville, we get parents and kids together who share a Kindergarten hallway (3 different programs) to talk and work together on specific tactics for helping kids read. (We just attended an annual Math Night at the Healey that is a great model of getting kids and families together to enjoy math!) We build community by eating pizza together, learning skills together in some creative way, and then talking, as parents, about how our children are doing with reading. (Planning the Reading Nights has also created a diverse team of parents working together on OneVille and schoolwide efforts.) We invite teachers to share tips with us, and as parents, we share strategies that are and aren’t working in supporting our own kids to read better. Meanwhile, kids do fun reading activities.
We held a Reading Night on May 18, 2010. Children enjoyed a multilingual scavenger hunt for words in the Healey School’s garden (compost/abono/composto; soil/tierra/terra). Everyone then went into the school library to watch a video of a Healey K teacher guiding one of the K kids through reading. Older kids then read books to younger kids, while parents shared ideas about strategies and struggles with young kids’ reading. Parent-to-parent tips included: if the child can’t sound out a word, look at the pictures for clues. Read the pictures before they even start the book. Alternate: let the child read one sentence or page, and you read one sentence or page.
At the April 13th Reading Night, children from a K class performed a book about penguins, driving home the early reading skill of telling stories. Parents watched a video about phonemic awareness and then shared strategies that parents had seen work for kids’ reading.
Parent tips included:
- Play games with the sounds in words (pig! dig! fig!) and spell words you find around in everyday life.
- Tell kids long words they are struggling to read. Break words into syllables.
- Find your child books that he really is interested in.
To end the night, one dad shared a Nigerian folk tale that he was told as a child to help him learn early literacy.
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May 11, 2010
OneVille Report From Healey Parent Forum at Mystic Activity Center
Changes are happening at the Healey School in Somerville, and this is an important time to seek out and carefully listen to parent opinions. A new principal, Jason DeFalco, arrives at the Healey School on 1 July 2010. Important decisions about the structure of the Healey School are being considered by the School Committee this month.
Read comments and feedback shared at the May 1st forum in the PDF Report prepared by OneVille.
Twenty parents and community members came together with Spanish, Krèyol and Portuguese translators to discuss the future of the Healey for three hours at the Mystic Activity Center on Saturday, May 1, 2010, over a homemade meal. The meeting was friendly and comments seemed frank and sincere. Parents took full advantage of what they expressed was a rare opportunity to talk across lines of Healey programs, race, class, and language; they noted that many misconceptions they had about one another were raised and discussed. After an introduction activity that had us declaring roots from across the country and world, we mused about the absence of parents with long generational roots in Somerville. Several noted that the forum would have been made even better by a stronger showing of parents whose children attended only the Neighborhood program (many parents in attendance had children in both the Choice and Neighborhood programs).
Parents offered opinions about the kind of school they wanted. At the same time, they expressed confusion about the difference between the Healey’s programs, and concerns about an uncertain future for the school and the impact of this moment’s instability on children. Three issues that generated spirited and varied responses were:
- parent involvement and outreach opportunities that increase children’s academic success;
- access to activities and field trips across programs, along with the parent resources required to make them happen, and
- teaching an array of skills that children now need to handle diverse 21st century environments, especially communication skills and the capacity to speak a second language.
The meeting ended with a straw poll about the three options for the Healey School that stirred strong emotions among participants. The majority of participants felt that the options to either maintain and/or combine the Choice and Neighborhood programs would benefit children most. Only one participant chose having a separate school for the Choice program as one of the two options marked on their poll. Most participants felt they could not be sure about which option was best for children until they had more particulars about how the Choice and Neighborhood would be blended and whether or not some important practices in the Choice Program would be maintained after the merge.
Key questions raised at this parent forum were passed on to the Healey’s principal, Mr. Sabin, who answered them by invitation at the OneVille bi-monthly Multilingual Parents’ Coffee Hour held on Friday, 7 May 2010.
Posted in Events Tagged Healey School, Mystic Activity Center, Somerville, Somerville Parent Forum, Somerville Parents 2 Comments
May 11, 2010
Presenting the words of parents
We’re about to post ideas from parents, collected at our parent forums. As a team composed of researchers, community workers, and media people, we’re experimenting with different ways of presenting this data to the public online. We’d like your feedback as we begin to present.
On the OneVille Project, we believe that education will work better for kids if people 1) talk specifically about what is helpful/harmful to them, rather than generically. We also believe that education will work better for kids if people 2) come together as a community to assist kids collectively.
So, how best to present people’s words after the fact? A whole transcript of uncategorized ideas is hard on the brain trying to analyze. So, we’re slightly categorizing people’s suggestions. That way, readers can walk away with a sense of specific things to think about.
At the same time, the human, community-building aspects of a face to face forum are hard to convey if you just categorize people’s “data.” When you read the entire transcript of a forum, you see people’s comments one after another and see diverse people sharing and struggling with ideas. That might better convey the sense of community-building that really did occur in our forums.
We’re also considering how best to present even critical feedback on improving schools in a way that clarifies Somerville parents’ deep desires to be partners with schools in children’s education.
So, let us know what you think when we post! Tell us how the presentation works for you – and let us know what you think of the actual ideas raised.
May 4, 2010
21st century parent dialogues, continued
How can community dialogues go from face to face to online, and back again?
On Saturday from 1-4 at the Mystic Activity Center, OneVille held a parent forum designed to support Healey parents to communicate their ideas for the future of the Healey. Our goal was to gather parent input face to face, and then share it out online so others can engage it. Translators from the community helped everyone express their thoughts.
Thanks to everyone who attended and participated on a beautiful day! We had a very productive event and will be posting all input from our parent forums this week. We’ve been considering best ways to format the input for others to view and respond online.
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April 26, 2010
21st century parent dialogues
Communications between parents, and between parents and city decision-makers, are key to student success.
Throughout April and May, the Somerville School Committee is waiting to hear parent opinions about the future of programming at the Healey School, which has long contained four programs within its walls. The School Committee is deciding whether the programs should remain separate, or combine. The Healey has also just selected a new principal for the coming fall, who will implement the decision.
We went to a School Committee meeting April 5 and noticed some communication issues that affect any diverse community:
- parents who were on a listserve found out more easily about the School Committee meeting. Others relied on paper in backpacks. The former group came to the meeting in large numbers; the latter group didn’t.
- parents who went to the School Committee meeting got great information (verbally and on paper) about the options facing the school. That information was all presented in English, however.
To date, many parents attending the school don’t know about the options facing the school.
Since the OneVille Project wants to support Somerville parents to communicate and collaborate to support the success of every young person in the city, we wanted to help out. So, we’re holding face to face parent forums about the future of the Healey School (our next one is May 1) and inviting all parents on to an online community forum that allows people to review each other’s ideas. The OneVille team will actively train any parent who wants to use the OneVille online forum to share their thoughts in any language.
We also walked around the Mystic Housing Development and taped fliers above mailboxes, a key communication tactic designed to reach busy people checking their mail!
In these efforts, we are asking parents a broader question:
What kind of education do you want for your kids?
We will collect parent feedback through all of these channels, and present it to the School Committee. After that, we hope parents will stay on the forum as another site to share ideas about education in Somerville. 21st century communication for parents: face to face, plus paper, plus electronic.
Related events:
April 27, 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Training, to use OneVille’s online forum
Healey Library
May 1, 1 pm to 4 pm
Healey parent forum
Mystic Activity Center
April 23, 2010
21st Century Community Collaboration
I’m a parent in the Somerville public schools, and a professor. I’ve worked for years on helping people talk about educating young people in diverse settings. Now, I’m learning how technology can help.
On the OneVille Project, our hunch is that supporting kids in the 21st century takes an ecosystem of communications between the folks in a young person’s social network. It takes face to face communications (like a parent-teacher meeting or parent coffee hour), print communications (like a handout in a backpack), and electronic communications (imagine a student emailing his teacher about an assignment, or a basic social networking tool supporting students in running communication about homework.).
As a research team, we’re trying to understand the existing ecosystem of such communications about kids in Somerville. And, we’re testing new tools and strategies for supporting communication and collaboration between key folks in kids’ social networks. Check back in with us regularly to see what we’re finding out!
Posted in About OneVille Tagged collaboration, communication, ecosystem, social network Leave a comment
OneVille’s next steps, fall 2010
OneVille is a pilot community project pursuing a vision already shared across Somerville. How can people across this diverse city work together, to support the city’s young people to pursue their potential?
We have an additional question. How can people in Somerville share resources, ideas, information, and effort to support young people, and each young person? How can basic technology help? We’re here to figure out strategies in Somerville that can then go anywhere.
Lots of people in Somerville already work very hard to support young people. But people are also calling for more ways of working together to support young people individually and community-wide. They’re also increasingly saying that basic technology can help. So, for the next year, in community working groups, we’re testing and designing community communication tools that can:
1. Help supporters pay close attention to the learning and development of every young person in Somerville.
2. Help more young people and families tap local resources, events, information, skills, and programs already in the community.
3. Help share more ideas citywide, about supporting young people’s success.
More soon on each piece!