Sybella Pope-Sears

Sybella Pope-Sears, Crusader for Student Success Through Parent Teacher Home Visits

I began doing Parent Teacher Home Visits years ago in other school districts and now continue them in Washoe Schools, where I am teaching at Kate Dunn Elementary School.

I started this because I had a student in the first grade whose attendance was such a problem that she missed a whole half year of school. This child was woefully behind. When I visited her mom at home, I showed that I cared about her child.

I learned that the mom had several very young children and it was a big struggle to get the first grader out the door to school. I showed how much I valued her child and her education. I began to see improvement after that with the child’s attendance and performance. So I made another home visit to reinforce our relationship. It worked!

After that, I began doing home visits whenever I could. When I did home visits in inner city Richmond, California, it was a wakeup call me. My students were worried for my safety getting to their homes. What about their safety as children getting to school?

By stepping into their world, I built buy-in.  They saw that I genuinely cared. So they were willing to try harder in school. I saw the direct connection to my students’ motivation.

Another student I had was the son of gang members. This student was gone for a week from school. When I did a home visit, I realized the volume of issues at home the student was dealing with. But the father shook my hand and agreed to try harder to get his son to school And it worked. This student, who had not bought into school previously, began to care, try and perform.

The message that Parent Teacher Home Visits give are: You are worth my time! You are important! I have a better future in mind for you!

Susan Mayes-Smith

Why a Principal Supports the Path to Citizenship - Susan Mayes-Smith

I am Susan Mayes-Smith, Principal of Truckee Meadows Community College High School.  I have been an educator in theWashoe County School District for the past 22 years, with many years spent at the elementary or middle school levels. I have been personally motivated to assist a number of undocumented mothers with U.S. citizen children find a way to gain legal status, with or without the hope of ever becoming a US citizen.  

In some cases I was successful as I sought out immigration lawyers and found legal loopholes.  At best, mothers were awarded a legal work permit that had to be renewed on a regular basis.   Even so, the work permit is merely a short term band-aid for our U.S. citizen children. 

Research by Family Unity, Family Health Coalition, shows that many of the 4.5 million children in the US with one or both parents undocumented, suffer from anxiety and fear of losing a parent to deportation or have already experienced separation from one or both parents who have been deported. 

The study addresses the impact of fear, anxiety and grief on families, health care systems and schools across the nation.  In 2012, there were nearly 100,000 removals from families with US citizen children, with devastating impact on those children affected by those removals.

I shudder to imagine children living through the horror of seeing immigration authorities storm a child’s home and take away his mommy or daddy or both, and then to be left with an aunt, a cousin or and adult sibling to care for them.   It happens over and over. 

It breaks my heart that some parents, threatened by the broken immigration system, decide to self-deport hoping for a future chance to re-enter the country legally. They pack up their US citizen children to move in with strangers in a strange country and enroll in a strange school without any of the educational opportunities a US citizen has right to.

A Pathway to Citizenship for parents of Washoe County School Children, and all our nation’s children, will contribute to healthy, happy families.  And children will have a better educational experience if their parents could become more engaged in their children’s education if they didn’t feel as though they had to be looking over their shoulder at every turn for the authorities who can separate them from their loved ones.

I firmly support a Path to Citizenship.