PEMBROKE — The Renfrew County District School Board’s Parent Involvement Committee (PIC) is searching for more local input so is planning a county-wide tour to visit all the RCDSB’s families of schools.
The PIC is made up of several parents, RCDSB staff including principals, RCDSB Vice-Chair Wendy Hewitt and RCDSB Director of Education Roger Clarke. They meet regularly at the Pembroke board office and their role is to support, encourage and enhance meaningful parent engagement at the board level to improve student achievement and well being; provide information and advice to the RCDSB on parent engagement; communicate with and support school parent councils; and undertake activities to help parents support their children’s learning at home and at school.
The PIC meets about four to six times in the evenings throughout the school year and strongly encourages parent voice in education and continues to work towards increased parent involvement and engagement in the RCDSB. In the past the PIC would hold two annual events. The Achieving as One Symposium, typically held in the fall, featured inspirational speakers, workshops and displays presented by parents, board personnel and community associations. The RCDSB PIC also hosted an Assembly of School Councils which brought together board members, school administration teams, and school council members to share best practices and allow networking. This year the RCDSB PIC will not be organizing these events, but is focusing on a new project.
“I personally have been involved with PIC for five years now,” Ms. Hewitt said. “We have basically been meeting to plan the fall symposium and the spring Assembly of School Councils in the past. We had amazing workshops and such excellent content however the involvement has been declining over the past few years from parents so we wanted to step back and see what we could do to improve our parent involvement. This is when we started having discussions about starting from the beginning and coming up with a new fresh idea to rejuvenate the PIC for the RCDSB.”
This year the PIC plans on visiting local school parent councils groups to see exactly what are the needs of the individual communities and how the PIC can be a better support system.
“Because there are almost 30 schools, it’s impossible to visit all the school councils,” PIC Chair Tracy Somes said. “So we are planning to visit each family of schools throughout the coming year, starting with the Madawaska Family of Schools (MVDHS, Sherwood, Killaloe, Palmer Rapids, Madawaska and Whitney public schools) on Tuesday, Oct. 20 at 6:30 p.m. We will visit each family of schools during the 2015-2016 school year as a small committee of about four to five members so we might get feedback on the issues facing our parent school councils. The PIC is excited about this new direction as we focus on how we can encourage more parent involvement.”
