In considering the wide range of parties that could encounter, participate in, and even be significantly be influenced by our group’s proposed recommendations, it would be prudent to note that there may be some areas and groups of resistance regarding the proposals set forth by our plan.
Potential Opposition Parties
- Caregivers – While there would certainly be a notable portion of caregivers who would be interested in receiving support from educators, some caregivers may harbor reservations about the proposals listed by our group’s recommendations. Specifically, some individuals may believe that schools should have a more limited role in intervening in the growth and development of children/recommending support services for families and instead focus on education. Indeed, it is absolutely important to respect family autonomy and independence as not every family unit will require or may desire assistance. However, in order to approach this specific group which may possess objections to our proposals, it would be important to exemplify to caregivers how our proposed policies originate from a desire to improve student success and overall levels of equity and not to usurp control over the direction of a child’s life in such a manner that reduces the dynamic and irreplaceable role caregivers play in the life’s of their children. Additionally, on the assessment form that would hopefully be given to every family at the start of the semester, there would be an area where caregivers could indicate whether or not they would like to receive support services.
- School Faculty – Another potential group that may oppose some of the recommendations of our project could be school faculty. Namely, as our proposals would entail a respectable level of change in terms of increased efforts to provide support materials and/or meet with caregivers to attain higher levels of communication and collaboration, these changes would obviously require increased efforts on school faculty members. Additionally, as individuals such as speech-language pathologists, special educators, and school councilors are often subjected to rigorous and demanding workloads, avoiding worker burn-out, and creating additional responsibilities for this already strained group is an important concern for our group. In order to avoid resistance to having to potentially increased work beyond what is normally considered the status quo and not overburdening workers, it would first be important, as mentioned above, to highlight the importance of how these changes will work to improve student success and overall levels of equity not only within the local community but also in our society as a whole. Additionally, another point that could be focused on is that, even though there would be a transitionary period where participants in this program would have to learn how to engage in their new roles effectively, our group project’s framework is designed so that it can be implemented every new school semester. More specifically, once the preliminary transition period has occurred and the participants have become more acquainted with their positions and responsibilities, utilizing and implementing our group’s recommendations will become easier and more natural as time progresses.
- Local, District, and State-Level Education Officials – The final group of individuals who could operate as a potential opposing force to the ideas reflected in this project could be local, district, and/or state-level education officials. As our recommendations might require additional funding in terms of ensuring that school faculty members are properly trained for implementing the proposed recommendations, local, district, and state-level education officials may possess hesitancies in wanting to implement our desired plans due to the financial costs if implementing them. Aside from once again highlighting related research findings and the associated benefits of implementing such a program, in order to hopefully cause local, district, and state-level education officials to implement our proposals, we could recommend that a trial run of a small sample of schools be conducted before implementing our recommendations in a more holistic and wide-reaching manner. This course of action would be beneficial as it would present local, district, and/or state-level education officials with a “safer” option in which they could divert a reduced amount of funds to better gauge the efficacy of our proposals and address any unforeseen issues before investing more resources as well as funds to implement our program on a larger, more generalized scale.