Catholic Parent Involvement Committee

Building Parent Engagement Documents

The Council of Ontario Directors of Education (CODE) has sent the Board newly published Building Parent Engagements documents for use in our schools. They have been designed to support the important role parents have in contributing to their children’s learning at home and at school. Click on the link below to access the documents.

Parent Tool Kit and a Guidebook for Planning Parent Engagement

Making Connections:

Parents are the first educators of children and as such should have a prominent place in the formal education of their children at school. Parental involvement in students’ education has many advantages for children and research suggests that where parents are involved in a significant way, children learn better and more, have a positive attitude toward school and learning and stay in school longer.

Where strong links are established between home and school student achievement flourishes and consequently schools do likewise. By supporting schools and learning, parents contribute to good behaviour, academic growth and student success on many levels.

The Waterloo Catholic District School Board is committed to working together with parents in partnership to promote faith formation and student learning. Encouragement to participate in your children’s education is a prime concern for the Board and to this end many initiatives have been started in the past and many more are planned for the near future. Catholic school councils have been active in our schools since 1995 and the scope of their accomplishments in promoting the faith; academic excellence and parental involvement have been awesome.

A new initiative, emerging from the Ministry of Education policy on parental involvement has begun within the Board and this has taken the form of a Catholic Parental Involvement Committee – CPIC. CPIC is an official committee of the Board and meets regularly during the school year.

What is CPIC?

CPIC is a committee of parents who have been meeting regularly throughout the current school year. The first members of CPIC were appointed by the Board from current school councils with future CPIC members to be elected from within the Board. The majority of members are parents and the committee is chaired by a parent.

The mandate of CPIC is to increase parental involvement in all schools within the board and to make that involvement meaningful and productive for student learning and engagement. Parent Involvement Committees are required to advise the Director of Education for the Board on ways to increase parental involvement in the following ways:

Creating an annual implementation plan at the start of each school year to facilitate participation at the school and board levels
Developing strategies to help school councils reduce the barriers to parental involvement in their child’s education.
Establishing a protocol on information dissemination to parents and school councils.
Producing and distributing a directory of parent organizations (ethnic, advocacy and student needs) to all school councils
Providing an annual report to the district office of the Ministry on parental involvement in the school board, including a summary of involvement in each school.