Georgia Parent Mentor Partnership: About Us

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Nearly 100 moms and dads raising a child who receives special education services work directly for local school systems across Georgia by collaborating with families, schools and communities. Parent mentors work in a variety of different ways.

Parent mentors work in schools to build a bridge joining administrators, teachers, staff and families to help students succeed in school. 

Parent mentors work with families by providing resources, tips and ideas to help parents guide students through their school career and into transition from school into adult life.

Parent mentors work with communities helping schools and families work within the communities they live and work in to create job and recreational opportunities for their children and improve the quality of life for adults with disabilities.

About this Website

If you have come to this website because you are new to special education services in Georgia, you might wonder why we feature stories about broad education topics like CRCT scores, graduation tests and other issues which pertain to students who are not obviously receiving special education services.

Special Education is about Services. Parent mentors help parents, teachers and their community to understand how to get the most out of those services whether a child is receiving the minimum or maximum amount of special education services.

A large number of Georgia’s 180,000 students receiving special education services have a normal IQ, and participate in state assessments like ITBS, CRCT, GHST, and work towards a high school diploma with plans for secondary education.
While each individual school district’s parent mentor focuses on a different system-wide goal, many parent mentors work on assisting families with helping their child improve test scores, prepare for tests and help teachers and parents come together to define the accommodations a student will need to succeed in the classroom.

Special Education Students can Succeed in the Classroom and Parent Mentors work hard to help everyone to be aware of education trends from testing to innovative therapies so that every young adult can live up to his or her full potential.

The Division for Special Education hired Patti Solomon, a parent of a student with a disability in August, 2001 as a parent liaison to assist in increasing family engagement across the state. Soon afterwards, Catoosa, DeKalb, Fulton, Fayette and Grady County School Districts committed to join an innovative, yet ambitious pilot project to place one of its own parents raising a child with a disability on the leadership staff. They called them, “PARENT MENTORS!”

   

Next came the Division’s first family engagement state meeting led by Phil Pickens, Division Director at the time, and attended by the newly-hired six parents and their special education directors, two GLRS Directors, four GaDOE staffers and two leaders from Ohio’s Parent Mentor Program.After just two days together, the Georgia Parent Mentor Partnership took root.

Debbie Currere and Patti Solomon pose with Vince Dooley at the 10th Annual GAPMP Conference held in Atthens, Georgia

Today,nearly 100 parent mentors partner with special education directors in 86 schools districts to reach more than 150,000 students on I.E.P.s and countless other students with achievement risk factors.

Among their many activities, parent mentors embed family engagement initiatives into their district’s work to improve IDEA State Performance Goals.

In addition, these parents work closely with the more than 700 Title I Parent Involvement Coordinators as well as other state organizations, particularly Parent to Parent of Georgia.

   

Over the past decade, promising practices developed through the Georgia Parent Mentor Partnership were featured at national conferences in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia and Washington D.C. as well as at state conferences in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Ohio and Michigan.

The Partnership also runs an innovative website for families and educators; leads the family engagement work in many state improvement initiatives and published two GaPMP Toolkits on its work.