Parent Gauge and the Self Assessment

If you work in a Head Start program, you are surely familiar with conducting an annual self assessment. You know well that it is done every year in accordance with the Head Start Program Performance Standards, that the information collected is important for your growth, and also that there are challenges in collecting the information your program can use to best support your families.

A critical piece of the self assessment — and the entire Head Start model — is family engagement. But, how do you incorporate family engagement into the self assessment? What data can you collect?

Parent Gauge brings something wholly new to the practice of the Head Start self assessment. It is a research-based, valid, and reliable tool to systematically learn from your most important partners, Head Start parents.

Not only does Parent Gauge use the power of conversation to hear your families’ stories, it also allows you to gather quantitative data about family engagement in your self assessment.

Has your program set a school readiness goal that all children are regularly reading at home? Parent Gauge question 9 asks parents about whether they set aside time to read with their child. Parent responses measure the extent to which you’ve succeeded in this specific reading goal.

Is your program concerned with supporting parents in setting goals for themselves and their families? Question 14 will let you hear from the parents themselves about whether or not they have such goals.

Want to know about your program’s efforts to support children with disabilities? Parent Gauge can tell you how well you’ve done in connecting parents of children with disabilities to available resources and tools that they can use to support their child’s development.

As a Head Start practitioner, you know the importance of trust and connection. Parent Gauge will allow you to quantify your program’s success at earning parents’ trust in your ability to support them and their children in their development.

With Parent Gauge, there is finally a systematic way to include family engagement data in your self assessment.

Instead of going through the pains of creating your own survey, use Parent Gauge as a tool to have a conversation with your families in order to measure against your school readiness goals this year — and even begin to measure your year-over-year progress in a way previously unimaginable.

Want to know more? Check out our website and learn more about Parent Gauge and what it has to offer your program.