PPP SITE NEWS
by Janet Shepard, Director
February 01, 2009
Stewartsville has been a PPP site for over five years, but last year a K-12 team including the high school special education teacher, high school principal and an elementary parent decided it was time to take a closer look at building a home, school, community network for their students. The team attended training last April, created a plan and are putting their plan into action. Below you will see how they describe their work, a description of their newsletter, a funding idea and a link to their website. Thanks to Angela VanDyke for submitting this information.
Visual Aid - Charm
Bracelet
Practical Parenting Partnership (PPP) is a framework for
building family, school, and community partnerships. Visualize a
charm bracelet and its charms. The great things that are already
going on in the school and community, as well as the great ideas
that have not yet been implemented, are the charms. The charms are
pretty and valuable on their own but are even better when put
together on a bracelet. PPP is like the bracelet linking the charms
together and providing an avenue for new charms to be seen as
beautiful additions to the bracelet. The advisory board members
serve as the links in the chain, and the great activities and
partnerships that develop are the charms.
Newsletter
– We publish an eight-page monthly newsletter. It is
mailed to all residents in the district. We send out about 1000
copies each month. The newspaper class, teachers, administrators,
volunteers, and community members all contribute to the content. It
is partially funded by selling ad space to local businesses. We
took a different approach with the ads than one typically sees. We
offered businesses the opportunity to include coupons and the
ability to change their ads every month if they like. We wanted to
bring new customers in their doors, not just sell them a place to
print their names. The owner of the local pizza place said the
coupons in our newsletter have been the best response to
advertising she has ever had.
Scrip—Another method of
raising money is our scrip program. Scrip is substitute money. Most
of our local businesses participate in the program, and we have
access to hundreds of national cards through a scrip company.
Families buy gift cards to places they regularly shop. They pay the
school face value for them, and then the school buys those cards at
a discount. The school then shares the profits with families on a
50/50 split. For example, if a family buys a local gas card that
offers a 3% discount, the school keeps half of the savings, and the
family gets the other half. The family's portion is put into an
account that gets paid back twice a year to help reimburse the
family for costs they incur when their children participate in
activities like field trips, sports, clubs, etc. In the first four
months of our program, we have had about 15 families and teachers
who have participated and have made about $500 total.
Grant—The
team received a grant to create a family resource center.
We have also enhanced our school's website by adding an interactive
calendar, resources for students, families, community members and
teachers. We also post the city's newsletter on our site. The
address is http://www.geocities.com/stewartsvillepride/
