About The Sundays Project*
It is our belief that solutions to educational challenges are available within the affected community itself; it is up to us to help define what issues the community is willing to tackle, find the “positive deviants” in the community already succeeding around this issue and explore those skills with the rest of the community. It is up to the community to change norms to reflect the behaviors of their own positive deviants once they have identified issues they wish to change. It is also HPIRC’s policy to use the strengths of our Parent Advisory Group (PAG) to guide our work at all levels and to give input into statewide PIRC initiatives. By combining these two concepts we have created the Sundays Project.
Hawaii PIRC has two PAG subcommittees broken up by ethnicity: the Chuukese and Marshallese Advisory Groups. When our Chuukese PAG was posed with the question “What do all parents need to know for their children to succeed in school?” and then “what is the best means to convey this information to all parents?” they worked diligently to come up with the Sundays Project www.hawaiipirc.org/sundays/english. The Marshallese are working on their own version of what they feel is important for Marshallese parents to know.
This Project consists of seven main parent involvement concepts broken down by week. Each concept is shared through church leaders to the congregation for seven consecutive weeks beginning prior to the start of the school year. Accompanying these concepts are posters and handouts with inviting original artwork also used in our Acculturation Handbook. HPIRC provides resources available in the community to accompany each concept. Prior to beginning the Sundays Project in each church, the leaders are trained to understand the concepts and resources already available in their communities. They are taught to provide workshops and education within their church, and act as an educational resource to the church members. In this way HPIRC builds capacity within communities where academic failure is high and school achievement and parent involvement with school is low. This project has also led us to use the Sundays Project as the cornerstone for our evaluation efforts to explore whether the project has a positive long term impact in the congregation. By using the positive deviance model www.positivedeviance.org to improve academic achievement within the COFA (Compact of Free Association) migrant church community we hope to show positive impacts on truancy and school absenteeism rates. Secondary impacts of the project will also be explored. To date eleven Chuukese churches on two islands have shown great interest in the concept; we began working with four of these churches by May 12, 2009. Our Sundays Project was a long creation and completion process, but the outcomes and potential are well worth the effort. This project was originally meant for churches and church leaders but Hawaii Department of Education (HDOE) and others are also very interested. Transition teams at the complex level, Head Start and Kindergartens want to use it for parent trainings. Elementary schools want the translated versions to use in their registrars office with new families as a way to help them understand the school’s expectations. Hawaii’s Parent Training and Information Center is interested in using it for parents of disabled children. All of these uses will be explored this upcoming year.
Within the church community we have been astounded by the number of churches desiring to work with us on the project and the number willing to be a part of our evaluation. Due to the evaluation’s design and intense time commitments our evaluator and project director feel we should limit the number to those we have the strongest working relationship. This year we have chosen two churches to implement our evaluation.
*The HPIRC Sundays Project takes inspiration from The Florida Partnership For Family Involvement Education 6 Sundays for School Success and the Republic of the Marshall Islands PIRC 10 Sundays.
