Non-Traditional Outreach

Hello from BU! I, like Aaron, must begin with an apology that I neglected my blogging duties for as obscenely long as I have, but here we are at last.

In the last two months, I have been visiting as many of Boston’s public schools as I have been able to, generally for events like back-to-school open houses and Parent Council meetings, to present the Scholarship for Parents to families who might be ready to return to school. I must express my awe and gratitude to staff and faculty at those schools, who have been so welcoming and supportive of BU’s outreach, and have provided me really positive space to have conversations with Boston families. I attended the Parent University fall kick-off over the weekend, which is a great program that BPS Office of Family & Student Engagement stages for BPS parents. The Fall Session was a series of workshops at Northeastern University designed to foster parent engagement and involvement; in addition to parents, many of the attendees were BPS staff that I have had the chance to work with this fall, and it was such a pleasure to reconnect with members of what I found to be such a warm and dedicated community. As the start-of-year push fades (September and October have been crazy-busy), Parent University was serendipitously timed to offer space to reconnect with schools that I have rapport with and can now move forward with deeper/more meaningful outreach.

I want to spend a little time discussing Parent University itself, because it is an interesting springboard to address non-traditional education. BPS’s Parent University is a series of classes taught at different district schools designed to give parents tools to take a more active roles in their children’s education, which dovetails so neatly with my goals as a *VISTA. I titled this post “Non-Traditional Outreach,” which is a joke that I use (not often to laughs, but I find it funny) to refer to my job: I do non-traditional outreach for non-traditional students. The language “non-traditional” is so revealing in that it represents that adults continuing education are so under-represented in discussions about college access and success, yet parents and parent involvement plays such a central role in college success. The reason underserved youths so often struggle with degree attainment is that they start the “college game” later, and that is often because college is not discussed at home like it will be if their parents have attended college. Programs that empower parents to talk to their children about college perform the most vital function of college success, which is augmenting the academic expectation. More immediately than pushing parents to hold their children accountable for higher education, adults who earn degrees have more confidence and earning potential, and are thus better equipped to support their families and communities. Parents are in this way the locus of change, and yet they are relegated to supporting roles in the college access discussion, and because there is no institutional expectation, the problem is creating the expectation that non-traditional students are exactly as vital to the conversation as 18-24 year olds.

Now that I have that out of the way, I can set down my pom-poms and think strategically about how to institutionalize this fairly new scholarship within the community itself. I am the third *VISTA at BU to work on Scholarship for Parents, and I am so fortunate to have followed behind two *VISTAs who worked so hard to make the Scholarship visible in the community and create institutional memory within the Metropolitan College. What I see as my challenge is to develop the content of my outreach, and to strengthen MET’s relationship to the community. In the end, this comes down to the relationships we have with community members, and how we foster mutual accountability. Legitimacy emerges as we realize the stake we have in each other, how the community fabric is dependent on that mutualism. Where the word “non-traditional” comes in is the nature of this relationship we have with Boston adults, which until two years ago did not legitimately exist. There have been no institutional avenues to compel working adults who are just trying to keep the wheels on the family wagon that college is prerequisite to family and community health. Now that I have developed a lay of the land, my job is to foster strong ties in the community and institutionalize the college standard.

Until next time,

Aaron Villere
MACC AmeriCorps*VISTA
Boston University Metropolitan College