Let’s get Involved: Latino Parent Involvement

The focus of this capstone project was to understand Latino parent school involvement and find ways to improve parental involvement in the Latino community. The project is based in Salinas, California, which has a large Latino population. Parents and teachers of a local school in East Salinas were interviewed in order to better understand the different views on parental involvement and barriers to it. Results indicated that the lack of parent involvement in the Latino community was due to the lack of outreach for parents with education barriers, lack of available resources for the working parents, and lack of parent-teacher relationships. In order to work towards change, parents were provided with access to the website and smart-phone application ClassDojo. ClassDojo is a website where parents, teachers, and students could log on and communicate about their student’s academic performance and classroom behaviors.The results of this project show that parents care a lot abou t their children’s academic success but there are barriers that prevent them from becoming involved in traditional ways. Given opportunities where they can be actively involved, without having to be physically present, allows Latino parents to be more involved in their children’s academics