Published: May 1, 1992

Prodigal Parents

Thirty or more times every week, Pam Lott, like the Avon lady, knocks on doors throughout Grandview, Mo., and makes her pitch. Only she's not selling bubble bath or lipstick. She's selling parents on school.

As a home-school counselor for Consolidated School District No. 4, it's Lott's job to get parents more involved in the education of their children. She is perhaps the best known emissary of Parents as Educational Partners, a 5-yearold program that has produced significant increases in school attendance and grades in three elementary schools in this bluecollar suburb of Kansas City. She is also one of a growing number of educators throughout the country who are refusing to sit back and wait for parents to come to them.

In the first year of the program alone, Lott logged a grand total of 650 home visits, dropping in on the parents of most children in the participating grades three times during the school year, and as many as eight times in special circumstances. A number of the parents Lott visits are fairly welloff, middle-class people. Others have recently been laid off or fear they soon will be. More than a few live...