MISSION
The Brookline Parents Organization (BPO) seeks to give voice to parents in the stewardship of the Public Schools of Brookline. It will uphold our community’s tradition of excellence in public education.
OUR GOALS
A Brookline education should promote critical thinking, nurture creativity, encourage multi-dimensional learning, and meet the individual needs and learning styles of every child. Our children deserve thoughtful academic curricula, intelligently crafted assessments, and positive relationships with educators and school administrators, rather than an unending round of test-prep. We seek to foster a collaborative educational community that gives our children the tool kit they need for a bright future.
CHARTER
The BPO is wholly dedicated to the education of our public school children. It will bring the thoughtful, passionate voice of parents to the issues that bear on their children’s education. It will represent the interests and insights of parents who wish to cultivate and nurture an environment of creative teaching and child-centered learning in our schools. Recognizing that the student-teacher relationship is foundational to a quality education, the BPO will represent this point of view to the School Committee, the Public Schools of Brookline Administration, the Brookline Educators Union, Town Meeting, the Board of Selectmen, School Councils and PTOs. The BPO will advocate for open relationships between teachers, administrators, parents, and students and for transparency in matters of budget, new initiatives and goals.
The BPO will provide a forum for sharing information and ideas among parents and school-specific parent organizations. It will offer a platform allowing parents to work together effectively toward common goals and secure an influential voice in the formation of policies that affect the education of their children. The BPO will aim to gather as much information as possible from the School Committee, Administration and other relevant sources and to communicate to parents what they need to know in order to understand the issues facing the Public Schools of Brookline and to act upon them. The BPO is committed to understanding relevant state and federal education policies and communicating to parents how these policies could affect the schools in Brookline.
The BPO will review the school system’s budget, expansion plans, enrollment policies, curriculum planning, new curriculum implementation, testing and evaluation methodologies, administrative organization and staffing, and any other plans or activities that will affect the quality of public education in Brookline. When feasible, it will encourage the Administration to share its plans with the public in a forum where questions may be asked and answered.
The BPO will review the performance and proposals of existing and candidate School Committee members and offer voting guidance to parents.
Membership
The BPO is open to all parents and guardians who have, will have, or have had children in the Brookline Public Schools. All members have equal rights to participate in BPO meetings, run for office, and vote in elections.
Governance
The BPO will have a Board with a minimum of nine Directors, elected by all members to serve staggered three-year terms. The BPO intends to include on the Board at least one parent from every school in the district. It also intends that the Directors should constitute a representative mix of student ages and family backgrounds. The Board will elect a Chair or Co-Chairs every year, or when appropriate every other year, to serve no more than two years consecutively. All BPO meetings are intended to be open to all members, and all meetings are expected to satisfy the requirements of an open forum.
In its first year of operation, the Board of the BPO will consist of the members of the Steering Committee involved in its creation. Click here to read about the current Board members.