When Nabeela Raza’s children heard that their school, North City Elementary, would close, they were worried.
“My kids (were) having a really hard time of that,” said Raza, who had three children at the school. “It’s like a second home for them.”
Raza’s in a parent group called Natural Leaders that meets at Ballinger Homes, a subsidized housing complex on the east side of the Shoreline School District.
North City housed an English Language Learner — or ELL— program that Ballinger Homes children attended. Parents, like their kids, were worried this spring when they got wind of closures.
“A lot of parents don’t know English and some kids don’t know English either,” Raza said. “They are thinking: How are their kids gonna survive?”
Ballinger Homes houses about 110 families, many of them immigrants. The Natural Leaders group helps with communication between schools and families at the complex, where 11 languages are spoken.
Children from the complex not in the North City ELL program used to attend Brookside Elementary.
Now that North City’s closed and boundaries have changed, all of the approximately 40 elementary students will go to Lake Forest Park Elementary next fall.
Gayle McDougall-Treacy, family advocate for Shorecrest High School and Kellogg Middle School, works closely with the Natural Leaders.
“Change is always hard,” she said. “I think people are and have been a little worried about the class difference, that Lake Forest Park has been a school with less diversity.”
Nearly 40 percent of students at North City qualified for free and reduced lunch, and about 54 percent were white in 2005-06, according to the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
At Lake Forest Park Elementary, 13 percent of students qualified for free and reduced lunch, and 81 percent were white. The demographics for Brookside are similar to Lake Forest Park.
“The (North City) parents were saying: ‘I want it to be as good a school as North City, I want to feel comfortable and welcome, I want my culture to be valued, I want the school to talk to me,’” McDougall-Treacy said.
This spring, faced with those anxieties, Natural Leaders parents took the initiative.
First, they invited district staff to visit the complex and answer questions about closures. That helped relieve parent fears, Raza said.
The group planned other ways to smooth the transition to a new school. They worked with Lake Forest Park staff, the school’s PTA, the Center for Human Services, which offers support programs at the complex, and McDougall-Treacy to set up an evening welcome event for families with a $500 grant.
In the meantime, Peter Hodges, Lake Forest Park principal, and teachers from the school visited Ballinger Homes to talk with parents and kids. They showed up at the Homework Factory, an after-school program run at the complex by the Center for Human Services.
“I wanted to have a chance to meet the kids on their own turf before they come and have to deal with a new school and new people,” Hodges said. “They will probably be a little more comfortable on their home turf than they will be at first when they’re new.”
He and other teachers walked around, introduced themselves, asked what kids were doing chatted with them.
The apex of the outreach efforts was the Tuesday, June 19 nighttime event to introduce families to the new school.
Lake Forest Park sent out buses and some staff car pools to pick up families for a tour of the shool, an international fashion show, a free book for each child and more.
Students from Ballinger Homes and surrounding neighborhoods attended.
“The families that went that night really felt very encouraged about how welcoming the staff was and how warm an environment the school seemed,” McDougall-Treacy said.
The next day, June 20, all students from North City Elementary who are going to Lake Forest Park came by for an orientation.
It was good for kids to see that, just like at their old school, they’d have a classroom, similar studies, a computer, Raza said.
“When they saw everything the same, they felt a little more comfortable,” she said.
This spring, similar events took place throughout the district. Students displaced by closures and boundary changes visited and toured their new schools in organized events.
As for Lake Forest Park, staff are looking forward to the newcomers, Hodges said.
“We’re just very excited to build a bridge and have them come over in September,” Hodges said.
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