Gadsden City Schools will use federal grant to set up parental engagement sites

Gadsden City Schools will use $400,000 in federal grant money to establish a program to increase parent engagement in the system.

ESCAPE — Enhancing Stronger Connections and Parental Engagement — will be set up at three sites in various attendance zones: the Megan Kelley Dream Center at 600 Black Creek Road, across from Floyd Elementary School; Antioch Baptist Church, 2103 E. Broad St.; and a location to be determined, according to system officials.

The goal is to have them up and running by Oct. 1, the start of the 2023-24 fiscal year.

Gadsden City is among 38 school districts in Alabama sharing, through a competitive process, in more than $14 million in Stronger Connection Grant funds that are part of $1 billion made available to schools through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed by Congress in 2022.

The school component of that act was designed to establish safety and crisis intervention programs, and to train school personnel on preventing suicide and human trafficking.

Gadsden’s ESCAPE sites, as a start, will be open from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The goal, according to system officials, is to make them more available to working parents than the present Parent Teacher Resource Center on College Street, which closes at 4 p.m.

The sites will be staffed by school personnel compensated with grant funds, and will include:

• Technology stations with computers and printers available to parents who need to work with their children or do personal things like submitting job applications, and for students who need more computing firepower than their school-supplied laptops can provide. The current Parent Teacher Resource Center only offers remediation packets for parents, where much of today’s instruction involves apps.

• Wellness stations, equipped with a kitchen (portable if the facility doesn’t have an existing one) where parents can receive instruction in preparing healthy meals; with treadmills and exercise bicycles, so parents can get into shape or work off stress; and options for addressing mental health. System officials also are weighing the possibility of establishing food pantries.

• Cultural stations, set up to look like the average living room, where activities like support groups, counseling and the like can be held.

Another component of ESCAPE, according to system officials, will pay a stipend to teachers in every grade level in elementary school, and every subject in middle and high schools, who’ll record their daily lessons so students or parents can rewatch them. Translation could be provided for English Language Learners should there be a need.

Students also could have the option to do “flipped learning,” which Superintendent Tony Reddick noted is an educational trend where students get their instruction at home, with the ability to watch and rewatch videos if needed, then do homework at school, where teachers can assist them.

Through ESCAPE, the school system will employ three off-duty law enforcement officers — at the elementary school, middle school and high school levels — to check on truancy issues, although they will be labeled “community liaisons” rather than old-fashioned “truant officers.”

They will make home visits once a student reaches a certain number of unexcused absences, not from an enforcement standpoint but to identify why the student isn’t in school.

Also through ESCAPE, “escape" or “sensory” rooms will be set up in each school, equipped with relaxing things like low lighting and fish tanks, where students needing to relax or chill out can do so.

Eddie Nichols of Breakaway Ministries, who owns the Dream Center, said the program is in line with his facility’s goal to become a one-stop place to meet people’s needs. He said from December 2022 to June 2023, 5,400 students had been involved in its afterschool, basketball and soccer programs.

Nichols said the goal is to reach the community through investing in children’s lives, and a key to that is building parents’ trust and getting them involved.

The Rev. Larry Weathers, pastor of Antioch Baptist, echoed that. “Anything you build, you want to build from the bottom up,” he said. “Once you get the kids involved, everybody else will get involved.”

He noted Alabama’s new third-grade reading level requirements and said the program will help ensure that students can compete. “All our students deserve a chance to excel,” he said.

Weathers, whose church already hosts outreach events such as job fairs, called it “a great opportunity” to “help the community and be of service, and that’s what you want to do.

“We want to touch the kids and touch the lives of everybody in a positive way, and we’re blessed to have a facility that can accommodate a lot of things,” he added. “I feel really privileged to be able to do this.”

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Federal grant will help Gadsden schools foster parental engagement