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Dear Mr. Huntley,
The New York State PTA is pleased to continue its involvement with the consortium and to add its support to the application for the third "Targeted Instructional Staff' Development" grant.
Through our work with many of these consortium members in the Learner Centered/Standards focused grants received through LEA Massena, our parents advisory committee has designed a booklet of strategies for parent involvement in the project based activities that address State standards. It is our hope that we can develop school/parent workshops to provide training in use of these strategies. We also want to continue our efforts to encourage school improvement teams and learner centered teachers to include parents in their activities. We are particularly pleased that our efforts have resulted in the inclusion of two parents on each of the six PGP teams proposed for this year's project initiative. Also pleasing is the number of teachers who indicated in written feedback, following summer training under this project, that the work of our parent advisors has encouraged them to focus more on parental involvement strategies during the coming year.
We are prepared to work with professional educators and project facilitators to explore ways in which we can increase parental involvement and support for perfomances based learning that focuses on State standards and assessments. We also have a valuable resouce in the National Standards for Parent Involvement Programs, developed by National PTA which we are encouraging teachers and administrators to consider as they strive to increase student achievement. Copies of this program were distributed and explained at the summer training session for project participants, and received an enthusiastic audience from many professional educators.