Individual Interview Report

Ways to Improve School-Family-Community Partnership

Since there seems to be different volunteering needs of schools, the school should avoid asking the same group of parents to be involved in all volunteering activities. Instead, the school should take full advantage of having sufficient human, cultural and social capital (Hornby& Lafaele, 2011) from the school families due to their high socioeconomic status (Ng, 2000) and to recruit parents to be involved in different volunteering works such as being morning greeters, costume makers, guest speakers at different workshops, representatives of different professions that are being learnt at school as mentioned in the interviews and witnesses of name drawing for special purposes. To relieve the concerns of recruiting non-functioning volunteers, having volunteer coordinators interview each volunteer to “determine expertise and availability” and to provide training on how to help out and the proper etiquette as school helpers will be helpful (Blank & Kershaw, 1998). In terms of establishing PTA, the school should give out questionnaire to parents to see if the parents are ready to be engaged in such work since the parent-run scout troupe has already been established. Money should also be budgeted for promoting volunteering (Blank & Kershaw, 1998).

In terms of avoiding teacher’s burnout through meeting the parents’ need of having more face-to-face meetings and after office hours parenting workshops, teachers should be encouraged to have such face-to-face meetings with the parents during pick-up and drop off during school hours. The after office hours parenting workshops can be organized by a special parent group with members who have strong social network. This special group can arrang...

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