Miller Park Elementary School, in the OPS school district, has enjoyed a 100% attendance rate for their parent/guardian report card conferences for the past seven years.
Lisa Utterback, Executive Director of School Support and Supervision for OPS, was the principal at Miller Park from 2009-2014.
She says she and her staff worked hard during those years to create an environment of hope for their students.
Now that Utterback works with multiple principals, she says she tells them they have to go above and beyond what the district sets for report card conferences.
She says schools should be reaching out for other avenues and opportunities for those conversations to happen.
"Year after year these teachers gathered together. In some cases, they bought bags of groceries and did home visits. They worked together and did visits at a homeless shelter. They made arrangements, if there was someone that was incarcerated, to go to the Douglas County Jail to make those visits with the family. And they built those relationships and they reaped the rewards because the students saw we didn’t judge a parent.”
Utterback says when students see teachers creating relationships with their parents and guardians, they see that everyone is in it together, working toward the same goal.
So it may not be too surprising that, in addition to having several consecutive years where 100% of their parents and guardians attended report card conferences with teachers, the students at Miller Park also saw a double digit increase in academic scores across all areas.