Training Parents as Co-Pilots through Online Parent Academy

Dr. Leigh Ann Bradshaw, Associate Superintendent, Professional Learning, Orange County Public Schools (Florida)

During the last three years, the connection between school and home was abruptly severed by the pandemic but created an opportunity for families to engage in classrooms like never before. However, even one year after returning to face-to-face instruction, parents and families continue to struggle to reconnect with schools. For all of its faults, online learning during the pandemic helped us to see parents as co-pilots in learning and they don't want to stop flying! But like any good pilot, these partners need ongoing training. The Parent Academy shows families how to stay the course.

Delving into the Parent Academy History

Orange County Public Schools is the nation’s fourth-largest school district with about 209,000 students in central Florida. In 2013, the district began to roll out blended learning while also offering face-to-face training for parents.

The first component was our LaunchED blended learning program, which provides every student with a digital device for learning. In elementary school, digital devices are used in combination with traditional materials during the school day. In middle and high school, digital devices travel back and forth between school and home and are used largely in place of traditional materials.

The Parent Academy, which also began in 2013, initially provided regional opportunities for parents to attend face-to-face training on a variety of topics designed to promote family engagement such as learning to check your child's homework online and using digital resources at home. Parents are clamoring for more of this information because many parents still look in their child's backpacks only to find them empty. As schools transition to blended learning, the homework and information that was once found in planners, folders, or even crumpled in the bottom of backpacks between crumbs and pencils, can suddenly be elusive. The transition from traditional to blended learning has simply proved more challenging for parents and families than students.

Understanding the Parent Academy Today

In the past decade, the Parent Academy has evolved to meet the changing face of our community and the needs of families post-pandemic. Offerings now include full-day face-to-face conferences, regional Learn Where You Live Events, Virtual Mini-Academies, Lunch & Learn Live Online, and on-demand learning through the OCPS Families Channel.

“ The Parent Academy, which also began in 2013, initially provided regional opportunities for parents to attend face-to-face training on a variety of topics designed to promote family engagement such as learning to check your child’s homework online and using digital resources at home.”

Virtual Parent Mini-Academies are bite-sized one-hour sessions for parents which occur in the evening from Wednesday to Friday. Parents can choose to attend sessions from different strands each month. During the 2022-2023 school year, monthly strands included unique sessions on college admissions panels for families of high school students, digital tools and resources for multilingual families, behavior, homework, and transition strategies for families of students with disabilities, STEAM digital interactive family nights.

Virtual mini-academies occur in a webinar format where parents and families log in from their phones or computer and listen in as an expert presenter helps them learn about a specific topic. Presenters check their understanding of the topic using engaging polls, activities, and discussions. Multilingual families can access content using dynamic closed captioning options in over one hundred languages. Registered families who miss the chance to log in, can also watch the recording later right from their email or on YouTube!

Lunch and Learn Live Online sessions take advantage of social media to reach parents while they are on the go. Each forty-five-minute session is live-streamed on Facebook and features a conversation between a facilitator and a district staff member on a timely topic of concern in the community. Parents are encouraged to react and ask questions in the comments where district staff can answer questions in real-time in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Portuguese. Live captioning is provided in Spanish, the second most-spoken language in Orange County. This year's Lunch & Learn topics included student digital progress monitoring and reports, parent online health and clinic consent forms, connecting to schools with digital tools, school choice options, and, online testing and assessments.

On-Demand Learning provides access to the recording of all Parent Academy sessions. Parents often need information in the middle of the night or on the weekend, so the OCPS Families YouTube Channel provides access whenever parents need it! Here families can easily find the topic they are interested in by scrolling through playlists that feature topics such as videos for multilingual families. Each video has links to key resources linked in the description and parents can ask questions in the comments section.

How We Do It

Providing Parent Academy sessions using virtual, live-streaming, and online formats has proved to be a cost-effective and efficient solution for training parents to be co-pilots in their student's learning when compared with face-to-face training. By comparison, the average face-to-face Parent Academy for three hundred families can easily cost thousands of dollars including the cost of providing childcare, paying staff, facility rental, and food.

Orange County Public Schools has a small Parent Academy team of two administrators and one support staff member to handle both in-person and virtual programming. The team schedules virtual Parent Academy sessions, vets presentations, and trains presenters from different district departments or vendors for a fraction of the cost of face-to-face training. Other schools and districts can easily replicate this low-cost model using existing staff members and free tools such as Facebook Live, YouTube, and Microsoft PowerPoint Live and a subscription service to a video-conferencing platform such as WebEx Webinars.

To maximize attendance, the district advertises virtual and online Parent Academies on school websites, school calendars, and as Facebook events. Before each event, the district also uses our Connect Orange robodial system to call, email, and text parents with reminders to attend and an easy link to click and join. 

Know the Parent Academy Outcomes      

Not only are virtual Parent Academies cost-effective, but they also work! Virtual and online Parent Academy offerings through March of the 2022-23 school year drew more than 4,000 participants - and nearly 20,000 more viewed content after the live events. In-person Parent Academy events drew about 2,000 attendees, nearly half to attend a College Fair.

In 2022, 82 percent of Title I families and 81 percent of Non-Title families responded that barriers to family engagement are not a problem at all. Compared to all schools with a high Free and Reduced Lunch Population in an urban setting this is near the 30th percentile on this topic according to Panorama Education. Additionally, over 90 percent of survey respondents at Parent Academy events report they have learned something new. Beginning in June 2023, the district plans to compare the standardized test results of students who have a parent who has attended a Parent Academy session with those who have not.

In addition, the convenience of online Parent Academy offerings continues to allow parents to "come as they are," tuning in while cooking dinner or even at student baseball games. The positive comments we received tell us that parents still value this flexibility and the option to directly engage with OCPS experts.

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