Is our PIAC working?                                                                                    By Gord Kerr

Parent Involvement Advisory Committees were first introduced into Ontario in 2004 / 2005 as the Parent Voice in Education Project members were completing their final report.  At the time, they were working with then Parliamentary Assistant Kathleen Wynne and reporting to former Minister Gerard Kennedy.  While some Boards were ahead of the curve (Eg. TDSB), the majority of Boards around the province began implementation of the Board level Parent Involvement Committees in the 2006/2007 school year, while many others waited until the 2007/2008 schools year to make any real progress.  I’ve been contacted by many people from across the province wondering about what these groups should be doing and how we can enable them to work better.

Give them time.

When school councils were first introduced into the province, many of us asked exactly the same thing.  And over the course of the last 13 years, councils have developed, and in some cases advancing through several stages of development.  It’s true, there are councils that are working better than others, but here’s what councils have done:  they have stimulated dialogue and new relationships between parents and teachers and principals.  And within these new relationships, people have discovered new ways to work together and new ways to engage parents in public education.  And that’s what makes it all worthwhile.

The original mandate for the Parent Involvement Advisory Committee was written as part of Recommendation #5 and can be found on page 23 of the final report of the Parent Voice in Education Project.  Here is an extract from the recommendation:

“We recommend that the Minister of Education require a school board to:

Form Parent Involvement Advisory Committees (PIACs), chaired by a parent to advise the Director of Education on how to increase parental involvement.  Their mandate will include:

1. creating an annual implementation plan at the start of each year to facilitate parent participation at the school and board level.

2. developing strategies to help school councils reduce the barriers to parental involvement in their children’s education.

3. establishing a protocol on information dissemination to parents and school councils.”

These formed the initial ideas about what these committees would do.  But beyond these ideas, members of the Parent Voice in Education Project were also confident that, given the chance to form and develop, these committees would discover new ways to work together, with board staff, school councils and trustees to stimulate parent involvement and engagement in public education.

The membership of these committees varies from Board to Board.  The recommendation was intentionally made to enable these committees to leverage existing groups that pre-existed in some boards or form in a manner to best serve each local board.

The future development of these groups depends on the local will to make them work and the local will to discover and implement ways to engage parents in public education. 

Is the effort worth it?  I believe that it is.  The body of research compiled over the past 30 years indicates that student learning and achievement is enhanced when families and communities are engaged in education.  Could this be one of the levers still available to us to make further gains in student achievement in Ontario?  I believe it is, and that it’s worth the effort it will take to make these new committees work well.

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Last modified: September 28, 2010