Meet Michelle McKnight, a Baltimore County parent who lost her job as a licensed practical nurse for being too engaged in her five-year-old son’s education. Her son, who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, was having trouble transitioning into kindergarten and his school called her many times at work. Unhappy with the distractions, her employer fired her before she could even get to her six-month evaluation. (For more, see the MarylandCAN video of her story.)

Every time I visited my son’s first-grade class, I heard the teacher next door yelling at her class. I reported this to the principal, but the principal could not fire her because the teacher in question was tenured. The principal had been observing the class often and accumulating evidence of poor teaching, but she had to go through a long process to fire the teacher. She finally did—but not before the class had gone through significant trauma.

A friend of mine knows her rights as a parent. And she goes to her autistic son’s IEP meetings with her rights listed in her Kindle. But when she wants to make an impression, she carries her well-worn and tabbed copy of Wrights Law: Special Education Law.
 

On February 27, 2009, my fifth-grade son stayed home from school with what we thought was the flu. But he didn’t get better. He was dizzy and exhausted. He threw up when we took him in the car. He had to lie down in elevators. We took him to doctors and labs 23 times before we had a diagnosis and a plan for how to help him. Finally, he was diagnosed with POTS, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. Because of POTS his blood vessels don’t constrict properly when he stands and sits, so his heart has to work harder to pump his blood to his brain.

As many parents know, involvement in your child’s education goes beyond school hours and days. As parents, it’s essential to the success of your child. As parents we are given the opportunity every day to be involved in our child’s education. The statistics show parents that are involved in their child’s life do better in school. However, parent involvement happens both within and outside of school. Here is a list of ways parents can meaningfully engage in their child’s education within and beyond the school day in six core areas:

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Ujima Village Academy is a middle school in one of the roughest areas of in Baltimore, with 86 percent of its students eligible for free/reduced price lunch. Yet it is nationally recognized for academic excellence. Part of the school’s success lies in the fact that it is a charter school, and so it can innovate.

Many parents may wonder what are the benefits of charter schools, how do they apply and is it the best choice for their child. "According to PublicCharters.org, “Charter schools are independent public schools allowed freedom to be more innovative, while being held accountable for improved student achievement.

When my first child was in kindergarten, I walked him to school with his two-year-old sister. The road did not have sidewalks, and cars came dangerously close to children walking to school. I brought the matter up with the school, and the receptionist told me that the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) might be best able to address the safety issue. I went to a PTA meeting, and ended up serving as publicity coordinator and then president. We did a street safety survey of people living in the affected area and then worked with the county transportation agency to make the street safer.

Quality pre-K programs can be life-changing for the children they serve. As a parent, I can speak from firsthand experience about how my children’s pre-K prepared them for future success: in their preschool they developed literacy and cognitive skills--the foundation for reading, writing and math. Pre-K also taught my children teamwork--all critical skills for budding scholars. Even now that my children have left preschool, I can still see signs of the good learning habits that were instilled into them early on.

When my son was in kindergarten, I tutored reading to his peers and quickly discovered they had a wide range of abilities: some of the children in his class did not know the alphabet, but others knew how to read. Sadly, they came to the educational experience with different levels of preparation. Some parents had obviously read a lot to their children. By that age, some of the children had already begun to visit museums and travel. Some had been through excellent preschool programs. Others had not. They started kindergarten already behind their peers.