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The return of the PLAC: After a year of planning city school parents get their voices back

  • February 24, 2021
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The return of the PLAC: After a year of planning city school parents get their voices back

Adria R. Walker, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

The city school district’s Parent Leadership Advisory Council (PLAC) officially re-launched last week after about a year of preparation from a dedicated team of parents, caregivers and the RCSD Office of Parent Engagement.

Kenyon Binns is acting President of PLAC. He said that the process began February of last year. Dozens of parents attended meetings to work on re-launching the organization.

Then the COVID pandemic hit, causing the group to lose momentum.

The Rochester Central School District building .

“Over the course of last summer and last fall, we were able to get a core group of maybe 5 or 6 people that would show up consistently to work on these bylaws and try to get this group running again,” Binns said.

So far, the group has primarily focused on writing their bylaws, which, Binns says, will be officially verified and approved by the Board of Education at their upcoming meeting.

Once that happens, the group is positioned to hit the ground running.

One of PLAC’s major goals for the year is to work with the Special Education Parent Advisory Council (SEPAC) and the Children’s Agenda. Binns says that they are planning on co-sponsoring a candidate forum for the upcoming primary in which school board members will be decided.

Recruit and encourage participation

The path to reforming and reshaping the organization has not been simple. Binns says that it has been a challenge to get people engaged. PLAC has been using Facebook to establish a presence in the community.

“What we’re trying to do right now is … let people know that we actually exist,” he said. “We had a meeting last week and after that quite a few people actually engaged with our (Facebook) page, so we actually saw a good bump in the last week.”

PLAC is parent led. As such, some of their main goals are to “recruit parents and encourage their participation in the city’s educational system at all levels.” The organization also aims, in general, to support and empower parents to be actively involved “in the education of their children, as a primary responsibility, rather than as a delegated responsibility from the schools.”

By virtue of simply having a student enrolled in the district, one can join the organization. People can email plac@rcsd121.org and follow the Facebook page for more information.

“We are back and we are looking for parents that want to get involved at the school district level and bring their concerns directly to the district,” Binns said. “That’s what we do and that’s what we’re here for.”

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