Final Evaluation Report for Pre-Kindergarten Parent Project

Executive Summary of
The Pre-Kindergarten Parent Project Evaluation
July, 2006

Parent involvement in education and children’s learning is a relevant and highly
publicized topic. Schools throughout the United States have taken steps to integrate
parent and family involvement components into their school reform initiatives.
The East Rochester School District has chosen to use James Vopat’s Parent
Project as a model for involving parents in their children’s education. After two
successful years of conducting Parent Project workshops with first and second grade
parents, the district decided to offer a Parent Project to the newest members of the
schoolcommunity, its Pre-Kindergarten parents.

All Pre-Kindergarten families (N=70) were invited to participate in five
workshops to be held on Wednesday evenings in March, 2006. Sixteen families engaged
in workshop activities that focused on literacy and child development. Babysitting and
dinner were provided. A Core Team of two pre-kindergarten teachers, a school
psychologist and two parents presented the workshops. Parents and educators read,
wrote, discussed, learned, and most importantly, had fun, together.

The Parent Project seeks to help parents develop skills to support their children’s
learning at home. It promotes trust, openness, and communication between parents and
educators. It links the two most important entities in a child’s life: family and school.
When parents and teachers know what each other is doing to help children learn, and
when they talk to each other about the child’s progress, academic achievement improves.
In order to assess whether or not The Pre-Kindergarten Parent Project achieved its
goals, a formal evaluation was conducted by Katy Allen, president of Impact Training,
Inc. and fulltime doctoral student at the University of Rochester.

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