Step 1:
Organize a group of parents, with a respected spokesperson, who is motivated and willing to push this project to the appropriate person at your school. This group will appoint a lead person who will work with each speaker to finalize any changes in the PowerPoint provided in this website. You want to make sure that they feel comfortable presenting the material. Obviously, the less they want to change and stick to the provided format, the less work for everyone. On the other hand, each speaker has to be on board with what will be on the PowerPoint flashed to the audience. The lead person will be the overall coordinator. They have to be motivated, have the time to commit to this effort and be able to work with everyone selected as a speaker to get them to practice their presentations, show up and do a good job.
Step 2:
Find the right person at your school to endorse and push the program. This at a minimum would be the principal or assistant principal, someone who can get give you the resources (time slot with kids during school hours, put out notices to teens and parents, addresses of parents, auditorium space, etc.) to make it happen.
Step 3:
You need a different person from the school who knows the kids and the parents who can help you select students and parents participate in the program. Our experience led us to one of the respected school counselors who had met with parents and teens in the school as a part of her regular job. As a result, she could tell us who would be a good person to speak as a parent or a student. We think it is important to have both a man and woman speak on parenting whose experiences have been different. They are not there as experts, or to tell parents how to do it, but rather to share their experiences as to what worked for them with sons and daughters. And, there may be some wisdom in having one of those a single parent to speak to those special challenges. Likewise, we thought important to have both a male and female student from the senior class who represented different types of experiences with their parents on these key issues.
We found, however, that both the parents and students selected should be able to support some common themes: (1) having a financial interest affects your behavior; and (2) parents who followed through on consequences/discipline changed their behavior. The selections of these individuals are critical and should be made by the spokesperson of the parent group, or the group as a whole, with the counselor and the school administration in agreement on the choices. These people will work as a team so everyone has to get along. This person at the school can also be responsible for the logistics of sending out the notices to the parents through a school website or the mail, reserving auditorium space for agreed dates, and setting up the projector and microphone systems for the presentations.
Step 4:
Select a person from the committee whose sole job is to arrange publicity and get the parents to the program. This person has to be dedicated and able to work closely with the person at the school who is handling logistics. The school rep will hand over phone lists and otherwise confidential information so the person has to respect the information and use it only for this purpose. After the dates and time for both the student and the parent programs are set, the publicity plan would be as follows:
1. 30 days before event: letter posted on school website announcing date and program;
2. 7 day before event: post card mailed to parents at home address reminding them of event;
3. 2 days before event: phone bank organized by publicity committee calls parents to remind them of event.
All of these materials can be found by clicking on Information & Materials button. All you have to do is change the date and names of speakers.
Additional Advice:
Have a dry run one week before the event. This program has a lot of information and the greatest problem you will face is that your speakers will not stay on topic and will run long. Tell them to follow the slides to cover the material. At the dry run the program coordinator can hold up signs about how much time is left and then tell them when they are out of time. The same person will fill the same role (e.g., could be the moderator) at the actual presentation. The moderator has to make sure that each speaker does his or her job within the time they have. Otherwise, people will start leaving before it’s over. |
