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In Miami, educators and community members have joined forces to mount an innovative parent education program for immigrant families: ENCHOR AKOR. I recently had the privilege of speaking with several people intimately connected to the program, which serves primarily Haitian parents of children attending North Miami Middle School.

Immigrant parents generally have access to few parenting education materials that address their specific cultural concerns. ENCHOR AKOR aims to fill that void by helping parents build more constructive relationships with their children and thereby more effectively support their success in school. ENCHOR stands for “Encouragement, Consequences, Honor and Respect”—the program’s four pillars. AKOR is the equivalent acronym in Haitian-Creole.

The program’s workshops and resources have won a strong following among middle school parents. In the process, they have breathed life into the school’s PTA, which has grown from zero to 55 members in only a year.

The national PTA recognized ENCHOR AKOR with an honorable mention in its prestigious Phoebe Apperson Hearst-National PTA Excellence in Education Partnership Award program.

In the interview, you will hear from four people:

• Pastor Georges, who has shared the lessons of ENCHOR AKOR with his congregation;
• Ms. Wilhel Jean-Louis, a mother and school psychologist;
• Mrs. Smith, a Bahaman immigrant and mother who went through the program; and
• Dr. Guilhene Benjamin from Miami-Dade Public Schools’ Parent Academy, who helped design the program.

Download the entire interview here, or listen to 6 minutes of interview highlights:

[A transcript of these highlights appears below]

You can also listen to the following excerpts:

• What is ENCHOR/AKOR? (1:34)
• Bridging Culture: from Authoritarian to Democratic (4:08)
• Linking Communities with Schools (1:19)
• One Parent's Experience (3:03)
• The Academic Impact (5:49)
• Forging Stronger Links Between Parents and Schools (3:35)
• "Students Shouldn't Check Their Parents and Culture at the Door" (3:30)

Interview Highlights
Public School Insights: What exactly is the ENCOR/AKOR program?

Dr. Guilhene Benjamin: It is a parenting education program which focuses on building positive relationships between parents and children.

The six sessions [that make up the program] are essentially based on developing the four principles of the method: encouragement, consequences, honor, and respect. That’s how the acronym ENCHOR is formed.

I found say that the particularity of that program is that it was developed through long years of interaction with the parents in the Haitian community in Miami, and I would say with a multicultural community which also includes parents from Bahamas and other Caribbean Islands and Latin America.

We basically gathered the parents and helped them discuss the issues they were confronting at the time. In the process I identified themes that preoccupied them most and challenges that they were encountering, and built the program around those challenges and those themes.

The parents I have been working with are basically transitioning from an authoritarian culture, functioning in the society that we live in, which is a democratic society. Doing that transfer between the authoritarian practices that they have used in their home country to developing new practices is in itself a challenge.

Public School Insights: If I might ask Mrs. Smith what her experience has been with this program.

Mrs. Smith: My oldest daughter was the one that gave me a lot of problems. But after coming to the program and learning with Dr. Benjamin, I began to act with her in a different way. I began to encourage her more instead of criticizing her.

By me encouraging her and letting her know that if she did certain things there would be consequences…She understood that, and she followed those consequences. Then when she started doing stuff the right way, I began to honor her by telling her “thank you” and by telling her “you did a wonderful job.” I noticed a difference in my own daughter.

So by learning how to encourage her, and giving her consequences, I began to honor her and she began to honor me. [Now] she gives me all the respect I want—all the respect I need. And I do the same thing to her. Its transcending from her to my other children.

Public School Insights: How do bring more parents into the program? Because I understand that the PTA in the middle school where you are located has actually grown dramatically.

Dr. Guilhene Benjamin: Yes it has. One of the things that we have tried to do is to associate this work with the PTA, because of the importance that we know that parent involvement has and because of the importance of PTA in involving the parents.

We are looking for new avenues to explore. We are making new alliances. Our parents go to church a lot, and they have this trust relationship with their pastors, with their priests. We want to be able to tap into that and engage the faith community in that effort.

The other thing also that we are working on, and need to work on, is to convince the school system of the importance of a program that focuses on building positive relationships. Because this [relationship] is at the basis of everything else that you are going to teach the parents.

We tend, when we build programs for parents, to inform them of how to teach reading to their kids. We inform them about the FCAT. There’s a lot of information. But the type of program which focuses on relationships is essential because everything else they’re going to need to do with the kids goes through that relationship. If they don’t have a positive rapport with their kids, nothing goes through.

Public School Insights: So then what would be your advice to other schools across the country? They may have parents undergoing similar transitions. What is your advice to schools and to parents like that to increase involvement of parents in schools?

Dr. Guilhene Benjamin: I would say that they have to listen to the parents. Parents know what their needs are, and we ought to be sensitive to their needs.

I feel that I need to stress that there is, in the Haitian community and perhaps its true of the communities who endure the same kind of stigma the Haitians endure, a crisis in the way that children respect or don’t respect their parents. We do see a lot of children who don’t have respect for their parents. I have come to the realization that the way that we treat the parents has serious implications for the relationship that parents have with their children—the kind of respect that children are able to have for their parents.

Because what [children] do is they listen to us. They see how we think and they see how we welcome or don’t welcome their parents. The way that we deal with that, as schools, is to keep ourselves in check in regard to the ways that we welcome the parents. Are we giving messages that we recognize their culture? Are we making a place in the schools to honor the culture of the children?

We may a school that has 80% Haitian students, and we make no reference to the Haitian culture. Those are subtle but very, very powerful messages that the culture is not important to us. [And] parents are the bearers of the culture.