in. it is a challenge. what i ve been doing is working with a community pta in chicago. again, i don t have a child who is right now in a public school, but for people who don t have children in public school or have a child at a school that doesn t have a pta, there s an entity called the community of pta, in some communities in chicago and other areas this is a growing trend. and what it s about is bringing together parents, again, you don t have to have a child in a particular school. people in the community, business people who are involved in the community, who get it that the health of the public school affects the health of the neighborhood. and it is through that kind of thing, for instance, before i came here i did some research on chicago public schools website and looked at the measures that they had for the health of the school versus things like the level of family involvement. and there s a high correlation between family engagement in that school and whether or not tha
so and this is the sort of thing, even if you have a school where a number of the parents are low income or not engaged in the school for whatever reason, because you ll find schools with higher income that parents are not necessarily engaged either, if you can develop a community pta that gets beyond the population of that particular school, then those people have to advocate for that school and the schools in the area. and through that way you can have more of an impact and not be so much tied into this notion that because all of the children in the school are low income and the parents are low income and apathetic or according to the way some people view them that nothing can be done about their school. something can be done about all of these schools. there is a solution out there. thank you so much to all of you. thank you to michelle reed, vanessa bush ford and joel klein. coming up, she plays the mother who spearheads the effort to take over a failing school and won t back dow