8161 Normandale Blvd. Bloomington, MN 55437 Web site: http://www.pacer.org/mpc/ Hours: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm Monday-Friday

Director: Ms. Heather Kilgore Phone: 952-838-9000 Fax: 952-838-0199 Evaluator: Susan Hasazi

Special Advisory Committees:

MN PIRC Advisory Committee

The Minnesota PIRC is a statewide project that helps parents to become more involved in their children’s education and helps schools to design and implement parent involvement policies. Minnesota PIRC does all this with the goal of increasing both student academic achievement and parent-school partnerships. It fulfills this mission by strengthening policies and practices that engage parents and families with their children’s education.

Parental Engagement Model
Minnesota PIRC engages families and communities through trainings, publications, and community linkages. All Minnesota PIRC materials are based on current research of family involvement, including the work of Joyce Epstein at Johns Hopkins University. The project serves all children, with a special emphasis on those from low-income and racially diverse families.

Early Childhood Model
Minnesota PIRC engages families of preschool children by partnering with two community-based programs, Parents as Teachers (PAT) and Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY). It builds on the work of these programs through additional partnerships with the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Department of Education. The goals of these partnerships are to:

• multiply the impact of partners’ work by identifying existing parent education opportunities where Minnesota PIRC can provide support
• provide a coordinated response to families’ needs, as identified by partners, through such means as in-home visits, group learning activities, and research-based handouts
• improve families’ experiences of transition from early childhood education to public school

Major Activities
This project’s multi-strategy approach includes informing parents, educators and others about family involvement, developing parent leaders, and building educators’ capacity to work with families.

How the Work Plan Meets the Needs of Parents
Minnesota PIRC helps increase family involvement in education by:

• providing individual schools with mini-grants and technical assistance to promote family involvement
• reaching families through workshops, presentations, and information in four languages (English, Hmong, Somali, and Spanish)
• assisting families to work effectively with school staff through a research-based train-the-trainer curriculum

Alignment of Work to Statewide PIRC Efforts
Minnesota PIRC reaches out across the state by:

• fostering working relationships among teams of school staff and parent leaders through train-the-trainer workshops and technical assistance
• building strong relationships with educational policy makers at the school, district, regional, and state levels to ensure schools’ commitments to effective long-term planning and programming for parent-family involvement
• sponsoring statewide and regional conferences to share research-based information and strategies with parents and educators

• reaching families in collaboration with school staff as well as through community-based, grassroots organizations
• using technology such as Web sites, Google ads, and an innovative Web resource mapping tool to help families identify local resources
• developing multicultural, multilingual strategies
• increasing public awareness of the importance of parent-family involvement through media campaigns around the annual release of school report cards and a statewide Parent Involvement Day