Taylor Woodard, a fifth-grade student from Central Intermediate School, has been selected as one of ten Box Tops for Education Kids’ Caucus grand prize winners. Her award-winning essay was chosen by a panel of expert judges from more than 2,000 entries across the United States.
In her essay, Woodard presented a creative and practical approach to improving parental involvement at her school. Specifically, Woodard recommended that her school send a monthly calendar to parents with personalized tips written by students to increase parental involvement.
"If the calendar was written by kids," Woodard wrote, "parents would be likely to read them and start taking action."
Woodard suggested that the monthly calendar will open the lines of communication between parents and their children. Woodard wrote that once this important communication is established, parental involvement in schools will increase, benefiting the school community immensely.
As a result of her award-winning essay, Woodard will travel to Washington, D.C. this spring to participate in the first-ever Box Tops for Education Kids’ Caucus. She and nine other grand prize winners from across the nation will have the opportunity to open dialogue with key policymakers and leading education experts about ways to strengthen parental involvement in education.
Woodard’s visit to Washington, D.C. will include one-on-one meetings with national policymakers, including Representative Ernest Istook, Senator James M. Inhofe and Senator Tom Coburn and a tour of Capitol Hill. The day will culminate in a reception that evening, honoring winners for their achievement, showcasing their creative ideas and providing them a forum to report back on discussions and events that took place throughout the day. As a grand prize winner, Box Tops for Education will additionally award Central Intermediate with a $1,000 Parental Involvement in Education grant to be used to implement her creative ideas or expand and enhance existing programs.
In fall 2005 Box Tops for Education launched the Kids’ Caucus Essay Contest, asking students nationwide, "If you and your parent or guardian were made principals for a day, how would you increase parental involvement at your school?" A team of expert judges selected the top student essay from all 50 states and Box Tops for Education granted $52,000 to schools across the nation to implement student-proposed ideas and enhance existing parent involvement efforts. From these, the top ten (10) Grand Prize Winners were selected to participate in the Box Tops for Education Kids’ Caucus Event on Capitol Hill.
If my mom and I were to become principals of Central Intermediate School for a day, what we would do to increase parental involvement would be to send a calendar home each month with personalized notes that are made by the kids that give them good tips for helping them to be more involved in their children’s lives.
I think this is a good idea because every month the kids would make a new calendar and come up with new tips approved by the teacher. They would put the tips on the calendar to help their parents with parenting, get more interested in getting involved in their children’s lives, and tips on what the right things to say is to get more involved in their children’s lives.
Besides that, if the children got excited about their parents helping them with their school work, then they would most likely tell their parents about it at home. When they tell their parents, the parents are going to want to know more about what their child is talking about. When the parents finds out what their child is talking about, then they might starting looking at the calendar and taking action. If they took action, then they would already be helping their child improve their grades. If the calendar was made by the kids, had tips thought up by their kid, parents would be likely to read them and start taking action knowing that their child had made the tips.
—Taylor Woodard, grade 5, Central Intermediate School