The Walton Family Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant to the Urban League of Greater New Orleans to help the organization expand its efforts to help parents evaluate their children’s education options.
The Urban League of Greater New Orleans will use the funds to increase resources offered by its Parent Information Center, according to a Nov. 14 news release. The center provides New Orleans parents with information about the wide range of school options available to families along with assisting them with the centralized student enrollment system. In the nine years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and its schools, the community’s education landscape has shifted to include traditional public schools, charter schools, and private schools.
The Parent Information Center, which has served more than 10,000 parents, will use the Walton grant to create an early-childhood parent guide and provide additional support to the families of English-language learners. According to the release, grant funds also will be used to develop a leadership program to instruct African-American business leaders and young professionals about education issues and to support the organization’s annual Schools Expo, which exposes families to more than 100 schools and community-based resource providers.
(The Walton Family Foundation provides support to Education Week, including this blog, for coverage of parent-empowerment issues.)