Hundreds attend Pajaro Valley Unified School District parent-educator conference..
The annual Parent-Educator conference was held in Watsonville on Saturday. The conference aims to make parents and educators advocates and active participants in their children’s academic lives.
This year close to 200 people attended the event. There were 16 different workshops on themes parents suggested from previous years or that teachers see as important factors in students lives.
Special Assignment teacher Ruby Vasquez says, “We truly believe that the heart of the matter for our students is the home. That is where the first learning occurs is in the homes, but we also are completely aware as teachers of what we’re doing in the classroom. There needs to be that bridge.”
Superintendent Michelle Rodriguez tells KION one of the most important things to know is the learning does not stop when you leave school, “the children seeing that their parents have an interest in and passion for their education, and showing that the parents are learners too is so very important.”
Vasquez says the workshops highlight a lot of issues that are prevalent today, “they live in their home, they live in their community, which is like their neighborhood and then they live at school. These are the three places where our students will spend a majority of their time so we try to select topics that the parents can learn a little bit about each of those realms.”
One of the most popular this year, the Cyber bullying and Social Media class.
Father Tony Guadarrama says that class was the main reason he attended today, “I have an 11-year-old boy who has kind of had some mishaps with the Internet and I like to monitor what he watches and what he’s involved with. So I want to be able to be a better person and a better parent. Since I’m a single-parent it’s kind of hard to manage certain topics.”
Educators from pre-school to high school also attended the event. Local pre-school teacher, Jessica Carrasco, says this is her second year coming to conference. She says she comes for the workshops and great local resources. “We took a reading workshop and they had really good videos that were sharing different ways to engage students in reading. And how you can take their personality and be able to have them get interested in reading through fiction and non-fiction,” says Carrasco.
While this is PVUSD’s biggest conference, they do hold other events throughout the year to keep parents engaged and learning. In march they will be holding a Technology class for parents.
