The Parents Advisory Committee to the Superintendent, commonly referred to as PACS, met with Dr. Eric Jay Rosser, superintendent of schools, and Natasha Brown, executive director of Community Schools, this past Saturday to discuss the recently announced District Goals and the challenges that parents and caregivers experience in navigating the district. As a strategy to elevate parent and caregiver voice, the superintendent has been meeting monthly with parents since 2021 to:

• Mutually develop goals that address student success through strong collaborative partnerships with parents and caregivers.
• Identify common needs and goals among the parents of students enrolled in the Poughkeepsie City School District and facilitate strategies to increase parent involvement and engagement.
• Provide the superintendent with feedback and insight from the parent’s perspective on school processes, policies and initiatives to ensure the needs of parents and their families are included as decisions are made in the district. 
• Bring to the superintendent’s attention existing and emerging issues expressed by parents at the school they represent.
• Serve as an advisory – not a decision-making – body that makes recommendations, encourages brainstorming and provides opportunities for parent involvement.
• Facilitate communication between and among the parents and parent organizations from district schools and serve as a forum for sharing innovations and best practices from around the district. 

Through the recommendations made by PACS, the district has instituted the Family Needs Assessment, ICARE initiative, and Back to School Bash. PACS also has helped inform summer programming for students delivered by the office of Community Schools and served as the genesis of the Board of Education's Ad Hoc Committee on renaming the district's elementary schools.

In discussion of the challenges parents, particularly those new to the district, face when navigating the district, the committee identified creating a Parent Guide to the Poughkeepsie City School District as a goal it would like to accomplish before February. The guide would, at a minimum, provide parents with helpful information ranging from understanding how to sign up for ParentSquare messages to accessing the support of Community Schools liaisons who serve as bridges between the school, home and community. Over the next several meetings, the committee will identify and outline everything the guide will contain, with a publication date of summer 2025.

In reviewing the district's 2024-25 goals, the committee also committed to engaging parents in addressing the issue of chronic absenteeism. Preliminary data from last school year indicates 40% of students in grades K-8 missed more than 18 days of school and 46% of students in grades 9-12 missed more than 18 days of school.

The committee decided it will open its Oct. 5 meeting up to district parents for them to share ways the district can strengthen its support to families so that students regularly attend school and also as a way for the district to understand the barriers that prevent regular attendance.

A formal announcement indicating location and time of the meeting will be released next week.