ACTIVITES OFFERED Second Wednesday and First Tuesday
We are utilizing the space for parent circle as well as MRC gatherings
PPU sponsors a safe confidential parent gathering called "Second Wednesday". This event happens evey month to bring families together to address their needs, concerns, with our support ......Workshops will be available depending on the needs of the Families. Make sure join our newsletter to stay informed and check the calanders often......The more involved workshops and trainings will be at First Tuesday.
Major Push out of our children from the Educations' Systems is no longer tolerated by families.. Our children are being suspended at an alarming rate. Our parents are talked down to, ignored when they advocate for their schools. Administrators are being protected even though they lie and minimize the concerns of the students and parents. We parents and our students are made to look like the crazy ones. Clearly our civil rights and our childrens' right to have a good education as well as treated with dignity have been violated. Please come to support the Families that have been strongly affected by harmful school policies as well as made up illegal practices to push them out. We want you to come and/or invite others to tell their stories also. We also need community support to encourage our parents to push back..
Why we have second Wednesday? We are getting to many calls from families, especially black families, whose young children are being disciplined harshly. Suspensions rather than in school alternatives seem to be the way to go? Our Black boys are being targeted at an alarming rate!! Our Children with Disabilities at an alarming rate also and as well our children's health issues are not being addressed at all. . Puzzling
We are sick and tired of what some PPS employees are doing to our children. We have tried to do it the right way. Now we must push back.. Please come to build those relationships for solidarity...
sometimes we just have gripe sessions.
just need to vent sometimes!
Posted on June 26, 2012 by Michele Cushatt
“As a bird must sing, it’s your human nature to tell your story.” —Tristine Rainer
“Everyone has a story.”
We hear this phrase often enough it’s nearly cliché.
Why?
Because we’re finally embracing its beautiful truth. As we watch others navigate adventure, grief, shock and joy, we see true stories played out all around us. The world is a movie screen, and her people our heroes.
Discovering Our Story
The PPU Discovering Our Story helps families/parents/students share the stories of their experience and/or their lives. The sharing of stories is a powerful practice, and is one that provides us with a vehicle for learning as well as healing.. It is our hope that by sharing the stories in accompanying healing circles. Stories can help you to re-awaken and remember your own story always.
Story-telling is one of our most powerful tools as organizers and movement builders. Writing it down preserves it forever!!!
Journey of Hearts The Importance of Telling (and Listening) to the Story
A Healing Place in CyberSpaceTM
The Importance of Telling (and Listening) to the Story
Kirsti A. Dyer, MD, MS, FAAETS
Introduction
At the most basic level "Telling the Story" is a means of transmitting ideas from one person to another. [1] Storytelling is a part of life, intrinsic to most cultures. They help people make sense of the world--life’s experiences, dilemmas and hardships. Stories can educate, inspire and build rapport. They are a means of communicating, recreating, and helping preserve cultures [2] by translating memories into a more concrete manner that can be handed down verbally or in written form. Telling the story can provide the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of one’s experiences and oneself.
Each person has a unique story, unlike any other. These stories are constantly changing and being rewritten, reconstructed, even discarded from the moment we are born until we die. [3] Stories help make sense of the insensible. Stories can help people explore other ways of doing, feeling, thinking and behaving. [4] Forming a story about one’s life experiences improves physical and mental health. [5] Storytelling can be regarded as one of the oldest healing arts; it has been used for centuries as a universal, useful way for the grieving person to cope with loss. [6]
Signing Petitions and writing
letters.........
CTE Civil Rights
The Office of Educational Improvement and Innovation (EII) actively supports the mission of the Office for Civil Rights: "to ensure equal access to a high quality education for all students through the vigorous enforcement of civil rights". A primary responsibility by EII is the review of career and technical education programs for compliance with federal nondiscrimination regulations.
Each year approximately three (3) high schools and two (2)community colleges, with at least one career and technical program each, are targeted for an onsite review. The comprehensive EII review permits the office to prevent discrimination and ensure equal access to programs, courses and the information therein, for each Oregon student. EII also provides technical assistance to help institutions achieve voluntary compliance with the civil rights laws that the Office for Civil Rights enforces.
Writing Correspondence.
Writing skits, plays with the idea that the best way to engage young people about socially relevant issues (drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, violence, bullying, dropping out, pushout, family engagement, etc.) to create peer-to-peer presentations, both interactive workshops as well as plays, that are honest, well-written, and that refrained from saying “Because we say so” or in any way discounting the intelligence or feelings of their target audience.
We use the performing arts, literary, and visual arts as a means of engaging young people, faculty, families, and communities in explorations of cultural and social issues affecting our lives.
The program aims to take advantage of the unique position theatre has in demonstrating the need for social justice. "Theatre is immediate, live, powerful, and engaging."
Teaching and encouraging parents how to write articles for the PPU Newsletter, contributing to the PPU Blog and Scripts for Blog Radio.................
Knowing your rights
filing a complaint.
Skits and Workshops
A due process complaint is pretty much what it sounds like: a letter/complaint filed by an individual or organization on matters of conflict related to the identification, evaluation, or educational placement of a child, or the provision of a free appropriate public education (FAPE) to the child.
IDEA requires school systems (called public agencies) to have procedures in place that make due process available to parents and public agencies to resolve a dispute involving any matter arising under Part B. These procedures include both the due process complaint (summarized in this article) and the due process hearing (described separately).
Due Process
Start a Petition
Start a petition
Your grassroots campaign for change begins here
1. Who do you want to petition?
2. What do you want them to do?
3. Why is this important?
Start my petition
Change.org is a non-partisan organization that empowers anyone, anywhere to start and win campaigns for social change.
Every day, people who start petitions on Change.org win meaningful change using the most easy-to-use & powerful grassroots organizing tools on the web.
Learn more about Change.org
Writer's Workshop
The Portland Parent Union "FIRST TUESDAY (PPU FT) activity can be the Writers' Workshops for Social Justice. The goal of the Workshop is to bring together a community of like-minded parents, families and students to instruct critical feedback on both individual experiences, learning experiences and negative educational experiences. The workshop projects are designed to advance social justice movement for the right for our children to get the best education possible. This workshop, plays a critical role in encouraging leadership and self-advocacy for our families as well as the productivity of "Parent Power". The workshop allows participants to create/present written materials that emerges from our urgent need.
This workshop is among the most important and valuable activities that PPU facilitates in order to bridge families who are going through educational discourse. As a conveyor of information between the PPU and the educational systems ( schools), PPU recognizes the importance of developing environments in which ideas can be implemented, hatched, nurtured, and readied for real time experiences. Consequently, PPU seeks to create environments built around broadly shared values and visions of the families in the educational system in order to support and sustain our strong educational values for our children.
GOOD EXAMPLES OF THIS IS OUR PARENT STORIES ON PPU MAIN WEBSITE
GOOD EXAMPLES IS OUR PARENT STORIES ON THE PPU SITES http://www.portlandparentunion.com/#!services2/cyoh
PUBLIC
SPEAKER/ MEDIA
SPOKES PERSON
FAST TRACK
What you need to KNOW. If you learn nothing else before facing a reporter for the first time, these tips will help you up your game – in just a few minutes.
1. Develop a Message: Little is more important than knowing what you want to communicate during an interview. Quickly jot down the three most important phrases or sentences you want to communicate to the audience.
2. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat: You should articulate at least one of your messages in every answer. You shouldn’t parrot them back verbatim, but should communicate the central idea of a message in each response.
Parent Training and advocacy
Family involvement
There is no topic in education on which there is greater agreement than the need for parent involvement! Families want to know how to help their children do their best, and how to communicate with the teachers and school personnel (Epstein, J. L., Sanders, M. G., Simon, B.S., Salinas, K.C., Jansorn, N. R., & Voorhis, F. L. School Family & Community Partnerships, Corwin Press, 2002.) For ages, researchers have been studying the dynamics of the family and the relationships upon which learning is built.
Families care about their children and want to be good partners. Often the roadblocks of time, easily accessible information, consumer friendly materials, and willing partners make the process of involvement cumbersome, at best, and sometimes very nonexistent in many communities.
If we are going to help students improve, parents are one of the major, key ingredients to energizing this success. Not only do parents need to be involved, but also they need to feel they can contribute to this equation of dynamic learning in the 21 st Century. Author: The Parent Academy of Miami-Dade County Public Schools
PARENT ACADEMY