Welcome to the 2010-2011 school year at Waunakee High School.  As a parent you may have many questions regarding policies or procedures for your incoming freshman or new student in our district.  Visit the Frequently Asked Questions under General Information for quick answers to common questions.

For both students and parents, the Student Handbook is easily accessed in the navigation bar at the left.  It contains topics such as academics, co-curriculars, expectations, and general information.  You will be pleased to find important dates listed that will help you manage your schedule and your student's schedule as the year proceeds.

Various staff members may choose to develop web pages to provide additional information to parents and students.  Those web pages will be accessible through the staff/department pages.  If a teacher has a web site, it will be listed on their department staff profile.

If you cannot find the information you are in search of, please feel free to contact the main office by telephone at 849-2100 with your questions.  If you need to contact our administrative team, please go to the Contact Us link for a comprehensive list of our office and administrative staff.

Are you interested in becoming active with the parent teacher organization?  Mariann Tjugum is the contact person.  We will be posting a link to that organization as it becomes available.  Watch our website for that information soon!

Special Education has a quarterly newsletter to share with parents.  Please be sure to visit this link if you have a student currently enrolled in any special education program.

Our district page also includes resources for parents.  Visit that page to learn more about additional programs and services.

What Kind of Parent Involvement Is Best in Middle and High School?

In this Education Week article, Debra Viadero reports on some recent thinking about parent involvement at the secondary level. “Having your parents involved in a field trip is not wholly consistent with what an adolescent wants,” says Nancy Hill, a Harvard education professor who recently co-edited a book on the subject, Families, Schools, and the Adolescent (Teachers College Press, 2009). “When you look at parent-adolescent relationships, you see kids pushing back on decisions they want to have control of, and it’s much harder for parents to call schools and find out how kids are doing holistically, because they have so many teachers and their teachers see over 100 students a day.”

Hill and her colleagues have found that a number of parent-involvement ideas that seem to work at the elementary level are less effective for secondary students – among them, helping with homework (very little impact on student achievement) and visiting the school, volunteering, and attending school events (moderate impact). What parent activities do make a difference for older students? According to Hill’s research:

• Communicating expectations for achievement;
• Discussing learning strategies;
• Linking school content and the child’s interests to outside activities;
• Working with the child to prepare for college;
• Fostering career aspirations and making plans for the future.

Researchers call these types of parent involvement “academic socialization” and recommend that schools maximize them.

However, these practices don’t help all parents help their children. Hill has found that parents who didn’t themselves go to college are less successful in raising their children’s academic achievement, no matter how many parent-involvement activities they engage in. Schools need to guide these parents to make their efforts more effective, she says. “They should be saying, ‘Here are the courses you need to take, and if your child’s not ready for those courses, here is what you can do to get your child ready so the pathways lie open.’”

A chapter by Robert Crosnoe in Hill’s book goes deeper on this point, addressing the slippage that often happens as students move from middle to high school – the disconnect when high-school freshmen are placed in courses that don’t match with their previous preparation. This problem is most common for Latino youth. “Where high-school students start off their coursework is the best predictor of where they finish their coursework in high school,” says Crosnoe, “and where they finish their coursework is the best predictor for whether they go to college and whether they stay in college.”

“Researchers Explore Teens, Parents, Schools” by Debra Viadero in Education Week, Nov. 18, 2009 (Vol. 29, #12, p. 1, 14)

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/11/18/12parent_ep.h29.html