New Britain Awarded Grant to Fund Parent Leadership Training

The Children's Trust Fund of Connecticut has awarded New Britain a grant for $26,000 to support parent leadership training. The funding will enable a partnership of the Human Resourses Agency and the New Britain Discovery Collaborative to offer two parent leadership programs.

The Parent Leadership Training Institute (PLTI) is a 20 week program in practical civics for parents who want to make a difference in their community. Download flier PLTI will be offered in the fall and winter of 2008-9.

Parent Involvement is the Key

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence in Kentucky convened a group to look at parent involvement. Their report , The Missing Piece of the Proficiency Puzzle makes for some interesting reading. One of the things it highlights are the very different perceptions of things between parents and people who work for the school system.

A companion piece to the report is a Parent Involvement Tool Kit for School Leaders. This web site includes tips and tools for school leaders trying to increase parent involvement

New Britain School Stats

There are two good online sources of data about the New Britain Schools on the State Department of Education's Web site. Since they can be a little tricky to locate, here are the links:
The first is the Stratgic School Profile http://www.csde.state.ct.us/public/der/ssp/dist0607/dist056.pdf (for other years change the 0607 to the school year you want. They tend to take a while to post the new profiles. 0708 was not up as of this writing)

CMT Scores http://www.cmtreports.com/Default.aspx This interactive site lets you look up data by grade, by school, by content test and compare it to data from other towns in Connecticut.