LEAD to host 2020 Parent Empowered series

LEAD Charter School was recently selected as one of five host sites for the Spring 2020’s Parents Empowered: Building Your Family’s Social and Emotional Learning Skills series. As part of the series, parents within the LEAD community will have access to the necessary tools to support their children’s social and emotional development as well as their own personal growth. About 20 percent of LEAD students are parents themselves, so this training series is also a resource for our students, as well as their parents and guardians. 

“This opportunity provides our parents with the skills they’ll need to break generational cycles of emotional mismanagement and dispel long-standing traditions that keep parent and child from understanding one another,” said Jasmine Joseph-Forman, Managing Director of Network Services. “At LEAD, we place a high premium on our student’s development, and this training has the power to develop a new generation of parents with more tools in their toolbox than their predecessors.”

The Parents Empowered training, created by the Abbott Leadership Institute (ALI) at Rutgers University in partnership with the Newark Trust for Education, is a six-week course where parents learn to understand and manage their emotions, to set and attain positive goals for family, and develop positive relationships through healthy connection and communication to their child. 

The Parents Empowered series will be led by parent leaders who’ve graduated from the course, offering a peer-to-peer connection that feels more like family, said Kaleena Berryman, ALI Executive Director.

“We love the peer-led aspect,” Joseph-Forman added. “These are parents, who’ve been enlightened, sharing their enlightenment to make a difference in someone else’s life.”

Spring 2020 marks the fourth group of parents to be enrolled in the program since its inception in fall 2019. There are currently 150 alumnus, and LEAD looks forward to adding approximately 20 new parents to that list this spring.