This week, I ran another Happy Parents Raise Happy Kids program at a local primary school. I had been in contact with that school for over three years now and had run various programs for students and teachers. For three years, ever since our first program, the principal, Cherie, had been trying to organize this workshop and looking for funds to make it happen. While most schools have a parent body that pushes for the workshop, Cherie had had to do it on her own.
As you can imagine, I started the day feeling frustrated with the time it took to arrange the workshop, but here is the story of what happened to the parents and me that got me to a completely different feeling in the end – gratitude.
8:30 am
I set up everything in the beautiful Resource Center next to the Junior Playground. Cherie said she was not sure how many parents would come. In some of the events she had organized for parents, only one or two of them had come. For this workshop, she had personally contacted each of the parents who had been struggling with their children.
“Ronit, we have many struggling parents”, she said to me several times. The school’s academic achievements had been low for many years and the last professional development with the teachers had shifted something in the dynamic of the school and in the academic achievements, so Cherie thought the parents were the next piece of the puzzle.