Each year, Long Island City High School (LICHS) hosts the annual Community School Breakfast to celebrate its partnerships and the impact that they have made on the school community. This past month, the breakfast has even more significance as we celebrate our schools Good Standing Status and recertification of the Culinary and Hospitality Academy’s Career Technical Education (CTE) Program. This year’s breakfast included collaboration amongst Zone 126, LICHS’ Community School Team (CST), Small Learning Communities Team (SLC), parent coordinators, guidance counselors, teachers, CTE groups, community-based organizations, students and their families. The morning was filled with stories of success, accomplishments, giveaways and delicious food, catered by LICHS’ very own culinary students. Collective improvement in education and community building does not happen alone, it takes a great deal of hard work and dedication from teachers, school administrators, families, community partners, local officials, funders, and of course, our students.
After the morning speeches and SLC tabling, the Culinary and Hospitality SLC split off to commence their bi-yearly Advisory Board meetings and parents took part in their own session led by Ms. Carrie Watt, enACT’s Site Director at LICHS and Ms. Maria Argyris, Assistant Principal of Guidance for LICHS. The topic of conversation was on parent’s preferred mode of communication and their feelings about, comfort with and expectations around communication to and from LICHS. Numerous parents preferred text messages over emails as they were informative, yet kept a professional boundary. Some felt that Parent Teacher Conferences were a great way to meet teachers and dive deeper into their children’s needs, but could be improved with less waiting time and more tips on how to support their student’s academic success. Another noteworthy takeaway is having multilingual staff available to speak with families over the phone and/or in-person moving forward. Principal Selenikas joined in on the conversation to demonstrate how the school is working to address these issues as well as to hear direct feedback from parents. The parent session was thoughtful and foregrounded LICHS’ communication for the upcoming school year.
The parent session was translated by certified DOE Translators to connect with families who are Spanish or Bengali speaking.
