August 11, 2023 – Parents new to Clovis Unified arrived at Dry Creek Elementary on Thursday August 10th in order to gather information on their children’s welfare within the school district.
Clovis Unified has held a “new parent” workshop like this in the past, and looks to continue hosting their “Parent Academy” which are monthly free workshops designed to familiarize parents with resources, support and information.
Many of the parents who showed up to the workshop are new parents to CUSD and were given the opportunity to meet not only with Clovis Unified representatives, but with certain programs and organizations such as Career Technical Education, Clovis PD, and the Clovis Unified Health Centers to name a few.
Held in an open-house like setting, this style allows parents to gather information on the district and the community, helping both students and families to succeed in school and beyond.
CUSD says that feedback from previous attendees recommended holding this type of introduction workshop prior to the start of the school year.
Registration became so high, over 500, that the event had to be moved to Dry Creek Elementary in order to accommodate the larger crowd.
Richard Sarkisian, Administrator of Assessment and Accountability for Clovis Unified, was happy to welcome families to Clovis Unified and perhaps more importantly get them in touch with different resources and opportunities students can get at their respective school sites. “We also just like to welcome them [new parents] to a new community.”
On CUSD’s reasoning for having such a night like the “Welcome to Clovis Unified” night, Sarkisian mentioned, “It’s out of some feedback we’ve received from families, we ended up doing these Parent Academy nights a few years ago, and brought them back last year. Parents were really interested in [the topics] that we had, so we just really wanted to expand it and really get that information out for all the different resources we had for our community.”
In addition to the informational booths provided by both CUSD and the community, there also appeared to be a raffle going on where prizes were being given at random to parents who received a raffle ticket. With this certain event of outreach to the public, CUSD looks to have a school year of success which starts August 21st.