Parents Get Involved in New Literacy Effort at Westview Elementary

Some Apple Valley parents are heading back to night school this year. The location, however, isn't typical.

is offering the opportunity for parents to attend monthly sessions to learn ways to help their children read at home.

The school received a $1,000 grant from the Minnesota Reading Association to add a parent component to the school's literacy programs, especially for parents whose children have a harder time with reading, said Lauri Torseth, the school's media specialist who put together the idea.

Parents and children are invited to attend the two-hour sessions, which provide interactive lessons to teach parents reading strategies to use with their children—not just "sound it out," Torseth said.

“We want to try to have an impact with our parents," she said.

Torseth has so far hosted two of the two-hour monthly sessions, to which she invites parents of kids who aren't meeting literacy benchmarks (though any parent can RSVP and attend).

Almost 30 parents attended the October session; 85 people total RSVP'd for November's.

Each session includes dinner and day care. Teachers volunteer their time to watch small children, and staff from the district's English Language Learning departments also help.

One of the challenges of holding sessions like these is accommodating parents who don't speak English, Torseth said; for that, part of the grant money goes toward hiring interpreters.

Some of the money also buys books to send home with families.

"The more they read, the higher their skill levels will be," she said.

District 196 as a whole is working on updating its literacy programs to create more uniform efforts from school to school, Torseth said. It received a state grant to implement some literacy intervention programs for special education and Title I students, she said—aiming to "close that gap" in reading achievement.

Westview's grant should last through eight months of literacy nights; the program hopefully impacts families in a bigger way, Torseth said.

"It’s a community-building thing too,” she said.