School Transformation

The Piney Branch Action Team

IMPACT has worked in local elementary schools since 2001, when a group of residents came together to seriously look at the ongoing achievement gap in our acclaimed public schools. This work began by empowering parents of color and of immigrant background to become more engaged in their children’s education.

In 2008, one critical team of parents helped us produce a report, Silver Spring Loves Teachers, to share about cases of successful multicultural teachers – and to make a call for better school/family partnerships and for grassroots change in our schools.

Their efforts and six years of parent empowerment have culminated in a serious change process at Piney Branch Elementary, bringing together a cohort of parents, teachers, and administrators to create a new community-owned culture that embraces the school’s diversity. The team itself represents white, African-American, African, Caribbean, Latino, and Indian backgrounds, and includes both the principal and assistant principal.

The goals of the Piney Branch Action Team are to:

1. Build strong personal and working relationships among diverse school stakeholders across race, class, culture, and position
2. Define a new vision of equity and inclusion for the school so that all children can achieve
3. Begin implementing an action plan that serves to institutionalize the vision

Participants are taking part intensive leadership and action training, which includes team building and dialogue, visioning, and concrete action projects. Their work has positively impacted parent/teacher conferences, student support for the Maryland State Assessments, and 60 new families rezoned to the school.

Follow the Piney Branch Action Team’s blog!

Why Piney Branch?

Piney Branch Elementary represents so many Silver Spring schools. Nearly 70% of the students are of color or immigrant background, and less than 40% of teachers are. Many parents of color have weak, if any, relationships with their children’s teachers – due to cultural differences in their approach to education, or to the very fact that parents and teachers’ backgrounds are often vastly different. The achievement gap is alive and well at the school – African-American and Latino students score at least 20 points less than their white and Asian peers on the Maryland School Assessments by the time they complete 5th grade, and students who receive free and reduced meals (a measure of poverty) score similarly, if not worse.

Why not make change system-wide?

For years, Montgomery County Public Schools has invested in top-down school reform. But for real change, IMPACT believes top-down reform must be complemented with bottom-up transformation. School transformation is a community-based approach – with ideas and action for a new future coming from the collaborative efforts of parents, teachers, and administrators. Transformation is ultimately more sustainable when all stakeholders are part of the solution. With the right relationships in place, the model developed and piloted at Piney Branch can eventually be taken to other schools and to other community contexts for institutional transformation.