921 E. 86th Street, Suite 108
Indianapolis, IN 46240
Web site: http://www.fscp.org
Hours: 8:00 am - 4:30 pm, Monday - Friday
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Director:
Mrs. Jackie Garvey
Phone: 317-205-2595
Fax: 317-205-9790
Evaluator: Dr. Jerrell Cassady
Evaluator affiliation: Ball State University
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State PIRC Board: Cheryl Miller, Executive Director, Indiana Head Start Association
Dee Jones, Indiana State PTA
Michelle Sigg, Indiana State PTA
Dianna Wallace, Executive Director, Indiana Association for the Education of Young Children
Dory Lawrence, IN*SOURCE
Jackie Garvey, Executive Director, Indiana PIRC
Julie Havill Weems, Indiana Institute on Disability and Community
Lee Ann Kwiatkowski, Director, Title I, Indiana Department of Education
Marilyn Bassett, Deputy Executive Director, Indiana PIRC
Nancy Zemaitis, Assistant Director of Exceptional Learners, Indiana Department of Education
Seana Murphy, Director, Twenty-first Century Scholars Program GEAR UP
Sue Switzer, former Director, Indiana PIRC Special Advisory Committees:Parent Advisory Council
The Parent Advisory Council will guide The Indiana Partnerships Center in evaluating and developing programs that are appropriate for target audiences. Members will serve as ambassadors for the organization and participate periodically in strategic planning to review purposes, programs, priorities, needs, and goals.
The purpose of The Indiana Partnerships Center is to provide parents throughout Indiana with the skills and knowledge they need to become more actively engaged in the educational lives of children, and to encourage schools to receive parents as true partners in the educational process.
Our goals are to:
- increase the awareness of parents, teachers, and community members about public school choice, supplemental educational services, and Federal and local accountability laws,
- utilize existing and new collaborations to implement successful strategies for effective statewide parent involvement practices and programs that lead to improvement in student achievement,
- create a network of trained parent and community leaders to strengthen home-school-community relationships, and
- implement early childhood programs that further the developmental progress of children, birth to five years of age.
Parental Engagement Model
Our key parent engagement model is our Indiana Academy for Parent Leadership©, which is modeled after the Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership, an initiative of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence. We also provide Train the Trainer workshops for parents and educators on topics such as: literacy, math, science, Asking the Right Questions to Get the Best Education for Your Child, and understanding standards and assessments.
Early Childhood Model
We provide subgrants and support to Parents as Teachers programs throughout Indiana. We also connect Parents As Teachers providers and early childhood educators through our early childhood newsletter and annual conference. We collaborate regularly with United Way Success by Six, specifically through disseminating information about their Dolly Parton Imagination Library and Born Learning materials. We partner also with the Parents as First Teachers initiative out of Indianapolis Public Schools.
Major Activities
We work in three primary ways:
- through information dissemination,
- through workshops, academies, and institutes, and
- through establishing partnerships and strong collaborations.
Our information dissemination is to a large statewide audience and comes through our bilingual website, bilingual print and electronic newsletters, media appearances, and presentations at educator and parent conferences throughout Indiana.
Our workshops, academies, and institutes provide in-depth training to target audiences. Our Indiana Academy for Parent Leadership© targets teams of parents and educators for a series of trainings designed to build capacity for parent engagement in their school communities. Our School Improvement Institute on Parent Engagement, co-sponsored by the Indiana Department of Education, provides professional development for teams of parents and educators representing schools that have not met their Adequate Yearly Progress. Our Latino Parent Gathering, Voices In Action, is a series of trainings for Spanish-speaking, immigrant families to better connect them to their child’s school and to help them better support their students in the U.S. educational system.
Alignment of Work to Statewide PIRC Efforts
To extend our work, we have formed numerous, strong collaborations with organizations throughout Indiana, such as: the Family Strengthening Coalition, Indiana Black Expo, Inc., the Indiana Department of Education, Office of Title I, the Indiana State Improvement Grant (IN-SIG), Indiana State PTA, Indianapolis Public Schools, and Twenty-first Century Scholars, Inc.
To expand our early childhood outreach, we provide a number of subgrants to Parents as Teachers programs in rural and urban areas and collaborate regularly with United Way Success by Six.
Unique Characteristics
Our work as a PIRC is unique in that we emphasize forming “cohort” groups of parents and educators who are able to work closely together consistently over the course of the academic year to address their communities’ specific parent involvement needs. |
