Teaching Self-Advocacy to Enhance a Community and Create Success
Client Problem
A non-profit was experiencing perceived lower success rates among bi-lingual children of mono-lingual parents within school. They recognized a need for a change in order to create a successful environment for everyone.
Learning Lab Solution
After a listening tour with the non-profit stakeholders and parents, we identified that parents were not advocating for their child’s needs because they felt this would be disrespectful. This led to a lack of access and accommodations that were needed to create a successful environment.
Through our educational and legal lenses we identified gaps in organization, knowledge and understanding of legal protection.
A few examples of our solutions include:
- Creating clear standards and processes around when and how the non-profit, students and parents communicate. This information was rolled out to the non-profit and parents in two separate training sessions.
- Training non-profit facilitators on how to effectively have conversations with the mono-lingual parents as well as the legal protections the students should receive under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
- Giving the parents simple tools to help them communicate with the institution.
- Educating parents on why communicating these needs was helpful not only to the student, but also to the institution, whose greatest desire is to succeed.
- Ensuring parents understand their students’ legal rights for accessibility under the American’s with Disabilities Act.
Results
The communication between families and non-profit increased, leading to more successful students overall.
The parents and students felt enabled to advocate for their exceptionalities or accessibility needs and the teachers had more information about how to create success for each student.
