Walk Softly and Have a Big Mouth
by Pete Stidman
You might say Caprice Taylor-Mendez, Ed.M.’98, talks a lot. She
can sit, as she did in the interviews for this article, and talk for
hours and hours on end, never boring the listener. But in her role
as director of the Boston Parent Organizing Network (BPON), she
often has to shut up.
“I think it’s in the blood. My dad has a big mouth,” she says of Frank Taylor, a lifetime activist who left Guatemala with his family when she was six after receiving news that he might be killed for creating a universal textbook for students that had a history chapter that was, as Taylor-Mendez says, “too true.”
It continued for her at Harvard. “I studied community organizing, where people with big mouths can meet other people with big mouths and use that group power to address quality of life issues for social change,” she says.
In a manner of speaking, as BPON’s director, Taylor-Mendez is seeking out and nurturing potentially big-mouthed mothers, fathers, and legal guardians from all over the city. Created in 1999, the organization’s mission is to inform, educate, and prepare parents to speak the truth to the powers that be in the Boston Public Schools (BPS). If heard from a parent’s mouth, the strategy goes, BPS is more likely to listen.
So far, it seems to be working.
“BPON has been a strong advocate in focusing the system’s need for making certain that there is parent representation and parents’ voices in our schools,” says Michael Contompasis, Ed.M.’87, a 42-year veteran of BPS who recently served as the city’s interim superintendent. “They have been persistently in the forefront, moving the issues forward to the point that the school system is now moving in that direction.”
In 2005, for instance, BPON parents pushed for the creation of outreach coordinator positions in 15 Boston public schools. A year later, two more family community outreach coordinators (FCOCs) were added; this past fall, the total jumped to 31. The coordinators aid parental involvement at schools with weak or nonexistent parent-teacher associations and in schools where the majority of parents and guardians work long hours or have other barriers to involvement.
“The parents themselves identify the issues,” says Taylor-Mendez, sitting outside a café in the Brewery, where, along with other nonprofits, BPON’s offices are housed. (In the early 1870s, it was the Heffenreffer Brewery.) “I tell them, I’ll support you in learning how to navigate the system. You’re not the only ones who are going through the issue.” She also gives parents detailed information about their school system and then helps them find ways to advocate for what they want.
It has not always been easy. Many BPS schools have dismal report cards, particularly those in poorer neighborhoods. In 2006, 15 percent of tenth-graders received warnings or failed MCAS English; 22 percent did the same in mathematics. Parents often link those scores with the fact that one in 12 students drops out of school each year. Other obstacles to good performance include high numbers of English-language learners (20 percent) and special-education students (18 percent).
In response, BPON is taking on a new challenge this year: helping schools communicate better with parents, not just the other way around. Parents, she says, are “not getting the information they need to exercise their responsibilities in a timely and effective manner.”
For instance, one student skipped school for three months before the parents were notified. And even when information does arrive on time, it may not be understood. Many parents’ native tongue is not English, and although BPS does translate in several languages a number of systemwide and school-specific communications, the translation services for all individual communications are not centralized, she says.
To get things done now, BPON’s parents will have to befriend a new superintendent, Carol Johnson, who took the helm in August. “My feeling is hopeful,” says Taylor-Mendez of Johnson. “We’ve heard from our contacts in the communities where she came from, Minneapolis and Memphis. A taxi cab driver was sad that she left; a grocery store clerk was sad for the loss. We need that kind of warmth, vision, and partnership with the community.”
In an interview with reporters just after she arrived in Boston, Johnson showed that she was already listening to parents. “It is that internal network of parents, that community network, that allows parents to be better informed and advocate for their children in the schools,” she said. “I always say the monopoly is over. We do live in a competitive world. FCOCs can be a powerful force for helping the next generation of teachers and administrators to do a better job.”
— Pete Stidman is a freelance writer whose last piece in Ed. was about the school’s Field Experience Program.
— Photo by Tom Kates
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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