The team with McCracken County High School accept the Family Friendly Certification from the Prichard Committee. Photo submitted by Bre Sykes Podunajec
My name is Bre Sykes Podunajec, and I am the Family Resource and Youth Services Center (FRYSC) director at McCracken County High School. My role at the school is to help students and families navigate non-academic barriers to education. The role of FRYSC is most closely aligned with that of a Social Worker. I help students with physical, mental, and emotional needs that may arise while they are in high school. These needs can range from basic needs like clothing, school supplies, and hygiene products to more complex needs like emergency housing, holiday gifts, and even helping students and their families with employment or housing.
Through this role, I have seen how important it is for our school to be connected with families. The difference between a student having and not having supportive adults directly impacts a student’s success while in school. At the high school level, students are more independent and this can sometimes lead to families not being as connected as they were in elementary and middle school. Starting this Family Friendly work really opened my eyes to ways to get our families more involved in their students’ education.
I’m going to be honest: prior to this past school year, I had never heard of a Family Friendly Certification. I didn’t know what it was. But after learning about what it stood for, I was immediately sold. All the things Family Friendly stands for, I do too. And McCracken County High School does as well. The Family Friendly website says that the organization celebrates “a strong, ongoing commitment to partnering with families in ways that support children’s success and strengthen their communities.” Above almost anything else, we value these things too. I immediately knew that we needed to make it a goal of ours to become Family Friendly certified – not only as an accomplishment to flex (even though we like that part too) – but more importantly because we as a school welcome guidance when it comes to strengthening the things we know are valuable.
At McCracken County High School, we are in the process of completely overhauling the way students move through our school. We are transitioning from a traditional high school setting to an academy model. This is an exciting new venture for McCracken County High School, and we don’t want to go at it alone; we want to make sure and involve our families and the community in as many ways as make sense. So we have spent much time engaging with these stakeholder groups in a discourse that will move us toward a unified vision for our school. And we discovered very quickly that Family Friendly could help us greatly in this process.
Marc Mavigliano, our Community Schools director, and I were tasked with putting together a team of people to get this work done effectively. It was clear that this would be too much of an undertaking for two people to do alone, and we wanted to make sure that we didn’t cut corners or miss opportunities. Our team we strategically assembled (yes, like The Avengers) consisted of Jennifer Shidal, our person in charge of social media and public relations; Andrea Heisner, a leader in our career and technical education (CTE) department; Rebecka Sutton, someone who has become an integral part of our Freshman Academy team; Brittany Sterchi-Ford, a teacher who is involved with other systems in our school like Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports; and me, our school FRYSC. We also asked two parents to join our efforts so that we had that differentiated perspective. We each brought different skills and unique perspectives to the process, which is important in this type of work.
After we got our team together, the next step was to evaluate our current situation. We had to ask ourselves questions about things like if and how we connect with families, how often we host events, and how we are intentional about making sure we reach all demographics of families. We met with the intention of identifying what we do well, as well as how we need to improve. What we found in that first meeting, after we sat down and really evaluated our situation, was as I expected: we did some things well, and other things needed much work.
The good news is that our Family Friendly team is not allergic to work. We brainstormed together, and then divided and conquered. Each team member took one of the five categories and we got to work researching and putting systems into place. One example of one of these new systems is as simple as signage. In order to make our campus more welcoming, we added signage both outside and inside the building. Our campus has multiple entrances and it can be confusing to know which one to go to, especially if you are unfamiliar with the school. We now have signage clearly identifying where the front entrance is, as well as the baseball fields and agriculture green house that is very popular around Mother’s Day. Inside the building, we added signs clearly identifying where to find important things like the nurse’s office, the FRYSC, and Freshman Academy for students and visitors alike to be able to easily navigate. And then in the end, we all got back in the same room to put all of our work and findings together, plug them into the website template, make it pretty, and submit our work. When we were notified that we had indeed received our Family Friendly certification, we were ecstatic! I’m very proud of my team and even more proud of the lasting connections with families and the community we have made.
Now that we have our Family Friendly foundation laid, will it be smooth sailing from here? Maybe smoother, but we know we have to continue to put in the work. We have not simply checked a box and moved on. I look forward to continuing this work and perfecting the ways we’ve engaged families and the community, as well as finding new opportunities to do so.
Bre Sykes Podunajec is the youth services director at McCracken County High School.
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