How Educators Can Use KidsCampaigns

Educators can use KidsCampaigns to find the latest studies on the issues that affect their students, such as welfare reform, literacy, and teen smoking. But KidsCampaigns is also a resource to help galvanize a community constituency for education. "No one sees the daily pain of these children and the daily struggle of teachers, unless they're here," says a Seattle teacher quoted in "Childhood's Future" (Anchor). "I'll tell you what it's going to take to create better schools. It's going to take parents coming into the school. Their attitudes change very quickly once they're here....We're asking you to come in, but not just to watch. Come in and put your hand to the plow and help us."
Get started—and keep going—by using the KidsCampaigns' online primer (it's also offered in traditional book form) called "101 Things You Can Do for Our Children's Future," by Richard Louv. The guide suggests ways that teachers, principals and others can create community-involved and supported schools, engage parents and businesses, create business/volunteer action teams, increase father involvement in the classrooms, improve the "literacy of thoughtfulness" and more.


Get smart: Find the data and documents you need from the U.S. Census Bureau, other federal agencies, and nonprofit organizations. For example: the latest statistics on financial conditions of the nation's elementary and secondary school systems; KIDS COUNT, a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which tracks the status of children, with national and state-by-state measures of the educational, social, economic, and physical well-being; "Years of Promise," a report from the Carnegie Task Force on Learning in the Primary Grades; the latest online statistics from the Department of Education. Also, The Education Finance Survey, from the U.S. Department of Education, with statistics on the finances of elementary and secondary public school systems.


Get connected: Find out what people and organizations around the country are doing to improve the lives of kids—and how your school can use these groups as powerful resources.


Headline stories: Visit our new section on teens, drugs, and parenting; learn how at an increasing number of schools, parents patrol the school grounds while staff and community leaders create powerful links between schools and churches, which together offer parenting classes and other family support services. Explore other new and effective tools to make our streets, parks and homes safe for kids. And learn how negative peer pressure on education can be replaced by positive adult influences.


Search Use this feature to find the information and contacts you're looking for, from education studies to techniques for education constituency building.


Sign our Guestbook, fill out our survey—and most important, give KidsCampaigns and its readers your feedback. Let us know what you're doing in your community to improve the lives of kids.


Contents An outlined guide to KidsCampaigns—from the news room to the most recent government studies to our favorite links to education and child advocacy organizations.