Ep 46 | Parent University Pensacola

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Parenting somehow in this age where change is happening faster than any other time that any of us can recall, we're expected to do this by the seat of our pants. It's insane, actually.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Welcome to the Voices United in Education podcast. Each week we showcase the teachers, administrators, and community members who go the extra mile to contribute to the success of every student in Escambi County. You'll meet the real people behind the titles and learn about the amazing resources to support every student's success. You take a driving course before you get a car. You complete training before you start your job. But when you bring a tiny human into the world, you're sent home 48 hours later with a pat on the back. If you've ever wished parenting came with a training manual, this episode is for you. My next guest is the executive director of Parent University, a nonprofit offering supportive courses for parents of all ages. Today he's going to give us insight into the unique way these courses are developed, how they're making a difference, and where they're happening in Escambia County, bringing the anti-overwhelm solutions, dedicated family man, and delightfully daddish Michael O'Neill.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Hi, Meredith.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Welcome to the show. You are delightfully daddish. I love it. You said you have four kids and 14 grandkids.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

At last count, yes. At last count.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

And what do you what do your grandkids call you?

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Oh my. It's a few things. Granddaddy, grandpa, those and you know, variations on that theme.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

I love granddaddy. That's what I call my southern grandfather is granddaddy. Yeah. Yes. It feels fitting that someone so passionate about family and legacy would be in charge of this. So it sounds like the organization is in good hands. And before you were full-time with Parent University, it this is so crazy. You ran the organization part-time while you worked your other full-time job as an electrician at International Paper. But here's the thing: anyone who knows anything about nonprofit knows part-time is 40 hours. Yes. Full-time is 60 hours.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

So why does the mission of this program mean so much that you would do all of that?

SPEAKER_00 2:26

You know, that's a uh that's a great question. And and one one of the reasons uh that that is the case is because initially I didn't see it having these kinds of legs. I didn't see it as being another career. I thought it was a thing I was doing. You know, for a minute, I would do this and then hand it to somebody more qualified, and then I would just go back and start fixing things again at the paper mill, um, which is what I thought my calling was. Um but when I got involved in this and um realized that this was more than anything else, this is uh this was this is a human exchange. This is a uh relationships. Um it it began to replace the priorities in my life. And so I I found myself unable to uh escape um the calling because it was so rewarding. And so um somehow not also to forget that around the 2000s, things like cell phones and laptops and became available. So you could in fact do something simultaneously uh gave me the opportunity to do both of these things at once.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

And so it became that bridge to kind of explore this as a full-time career.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Yes, yes, but it wasn't until even a little later till I even began to really think of it as I would as as I've may have mentioned, um, that I began to actually think about replacing my full-time job at a paper mill, which uh it's a fairly secure environment.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Oh, everyone knows international paper is a very secure job. So I think that speaks volumes of your passion for this program because it seems crazy on the outside looking in, going, why would you leave IP?

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Yes. I had a my my partner, uh, and I was just at that part of my career, I was in safety, electrical safety, and my mechanical safety guy, when I told him I was leaving, he thought I had lost my mind because he was 75 years old and still at the job. And he says, You're gonna leave this to go into nonprofit world. And my answer to him was simply that, you know, this is passion work. Um, at some point in your life, you come to realize it's more important that you're doing um what makes you feel fulfilled as opposed to what fulfills the bills at the end of the month. And I was fortunate enough to find that in my life.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

And so why does it mean so much to you?

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Oh my. Um because I'm a dad, you know, and and um, you know, I I raised those four kids, and you know, they survived, and most people would say they're okay. It's arguable, but most people would say that they they're doing pretty well. But there's some things I missed and uh things that I wish I had known. And unlike my other job, my electrical job, I relished the opportunity to train. I thought it was, oh my gosh, I get a chance to train. I felt great. However, as you said at the opening of the show, when someone began to talk about the need to learn more about parenting, I received that invite with a lot different energy. I thought if someone were to tell me you could be a better parent if you did this or if you did that. That felt more like an attack. That felt more like an indictment of my desire to be a good parent. And I I said, you know, if if I felt that way, I wonder if anybody else feels that way about parenting. And it's the reason why we don't engage in continuous learning around what is arguably the most important job on the planet. Why is there no training? Why don't we do it all the time? Why isn't it normal and not uh something we do to ameliorate a situation in the home or or outside of the home? Why isn't parent training just as normal as feeding and clothing and all the other things that we do to nurture our children? And so I began to talk with some people, some parents like me, and and ask ourselves, why is that? What is that? What's the difference? And they and they were kind enough to tell me what they thought. And those thoughts became the foundation of what we now call parent university.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

So, what were the thoughts? How does one overcome that inner ego to ask for help for everything but parenting?

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Well, when my when my job, you know, after I totally destroyed this machine they sent me to fix, my boss would say the next day, we're gonna get you some training on that. And I'd go, yeah, that's great, because I knew that meant they're gonna send me somewhere probably and pay me, and then I'm gonna get a certificate. And it could even get in line for a raise and all that kind of and status on the job. So there was all these positive strokes that was associated with training. You see, I'm gonna be the specialist on this particular item. Training around parenting has a different energy. You know, it's like, oh, what's wrong in your house? What did you do wrong? Oh, well, if you really wanted to do better, you could. It's like parenting somehow in this age where change is happening faster than any other time that any of us can recall, we're expected to do this by the seat of our pants. It's insane, actually, uh to be honest with you. But we're not here to talk about the psychology behind it. What we're what we're saying is what are the what are the um the elements that make it different? And one of them I just described. You training for jobs, you get accolades. Training to be a good parent, you don't get quite the same. So we want to do create an environment where you got those same accolades. We want parents to show up and their child is being taken care of while they're there. That they get breakfast, that they get lunch, uh uh, they get uh rewards throughout. And and and most importantly, they get to describe the curriculum. I love that. Because people get people tell you what you need. What happens when somebody tells you you should do something? Most of the time, you accept it. You know, certainly not full with your full vigor.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

No, you say you understand it, so the person stops talking at you. That's the truth of it. You're like, yes, sir, I totally understand. I will do that, sir, and then you just go on your way.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Right, and you do the minimum, yeah, and you look for a reason not to do it. And as a result, lots of resources in our community, lots of things parents could do, get undone. However, if we create a space that the parents say they need it, then they will use that human behavior that we all use when we are, when we own something. You know, be it be it your car, your home, whatever, if you feel like you own it, you go that extra mile, you could you give it that extra 10% because it's yours. And so what that what that gave us the opportunity to do was to create a behavior inside homes that oftentimes feel disenfranchised with the learning process. Yeah. Now they own the learning process. Now the learning, continuous learning is what we do. It's our culture. You see, so now we get up and we go to these classes, we have fun, we learn stuff, but we have so much fun and we feel so good about it, we don't realize we just learned something that's going to change our lives.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

I love that. You say it's not psychology, but there's what good is a program if no one is, excuse me, mentally prepared to receive it. Right. And I noticed on your website that every um I call them tracks. I don't know if that's what you call them, but there's the, you know, uh the general one, the um traditional early baby in tech. Yes. And under each one, its description includes parent input is like literally part of description. So tell me, what are parents in Pensacola asking for? What input are they giving you?

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Oh my. Well, you know, we're just coming out of this COVID environment. So there's a lot of things around mental health. Um, you know, we've been we've been cooped up in a strange environment for a couple of years now. Uh things that we were used to having were diminished, if not closed for a while. Um, jobs were lost. Uh our our world, all the things that we thought were we could count on, not so much. So there's a lot of mental anguish around a feeling of insecurity. There's also a lot of people who are now, or for a while, who are actually playing the role of the teacher and the parent, literally, and trying to make a living. So a lot of the things that parents are asking for are just things that um help them feel more stable. Now there's there's a man, I could give you a list of a hundred things parents asked for. But I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you a secret. Tell me. It's not what they asked for, it's that they asked. You see, so when we give them what they asked for, now they come into an environment that's theirs. Yeah, they create it.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

I think 2020 really created a um atmosphere where we put our own needs on the back burner just to make it. We weren't really feeling our feelings, as people like to say. So I think it's so helpful when you see other people asking for what they need or other people putting giving words to what's going on internally, because then you go, you know, I didn't know that's what I needed, but I think that's it. So, in that spirit, can you tell us examples of courses that have been created by Pensacola citizens so far? Because I think it'll help parents listening go, oh, I think I I could use something like that.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

Oh, yes. Well, there's been um, once again, I said Pensacola parents have asked for things like, how do I navigate the school system in an effective way? For instance, when I walk in a school and I need to do something, I I want to do something for my child, what's the process that keeps me from getting frustrated? How do I learn how not to be frustrated by the first person that meets me at the front desk before I even get the chance to talk to the person I want to talk to? Because you you're walking in an alien environment for parents. So how do I navigate? How do I advocate for my child effectively? Also, um technical issues, you know, all of a sudden, Zoom is national infrastructure.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

It kind of is. I never thought of it that way, but you aren't wrong.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

Okay, now and you've never, a few years ago, you never used this. So how do I become more technically adept? Because I don't want to ask my child um, how do I work this thing? So how do I become more comfortable with you know technology? And as a matter of fact, we created a tech college, but there's also employment, there's testing, there's how do I prepare my child and myself for the next couple of years with regard to education? Um, a lot of people get to a place in the education of their children and realize they should have done something earlier. You see, and but they didn't know. So how do I prepare for the future? And and one of the most common things that parents ask for ask for, how do I prepare my child for school? Now, you could be talking about 12th grader or an eighth grader or a sixth grader, but really preparation for school starts at zero. What do I need to do in my home to make my home a working educational environment? And so that's one of the and that's why we actually started early learning college inside of parent university. But I could talk about employment, people have asked for, uh health, uh nutrition.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Um those are all interesting because those are not aspects that I would have automatically considered to be part of parenting. But you know, I like to say that we as humans are spaghetti, not waffles, right? So like the part of us that would be the waffle square of education, you know, and then the waffle square of home life, parenting, love life, uh, tech life. The truth is it's not a waffle, it's spaghetti and it's messy, and you know, they get dried out and they stick to each other. Yeah, it's you know, it's it's a situation. So how have you seen this program support children's education?

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Well, it creates, once again, Parent University creates a parent who can complement everything that happens outside. What one of the tragedies is things, a lot of good things happen for our children outside or could happen for it, but then they come, the children come home to a parent that's not up to speed, hasn't heard the language, and doesn't know whether they fully support whatever the child has just learned because they don't know about it.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Can you give an example of that? I'm not following because I'm not a parent, so you have to lay it out for me.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Uh mom, I just came home and here let me, I need some help with the new math.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Oh, yeah. I don't know what the new math is.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Well, most of us don't. So what you learn at parent university is maybe you learn a little bit about the new math, but most importantly, you learn where to find help.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

In a way that doesn't make you feel somehow diminished. You see, you and you meet other parents that are going through the same thing. So you learn about what's happening in school and how you can help. You learn how to raise a reader. You learn how to not only read to your child, and not only, you know, you open up, say, raise a reader, and they show this picture of people reading to the children. That's one way to do it, but you can also read a newspaper. You can even read your cell phone, you know, and you learn all the ways that you can participate. And once again, what happens is the school system and everybody else can also put their classes in parent university. Because let's go back to what I said about it's the behavior. It's the behavior of learning. Because once you're hooked on the behavior of learning, you become voracious and you just have an appetite for learning. And so now there was that one thing that you liked, you know. So you went in there and you nibbled on that for a little while, and then you realize, oh my God, there's a smorgaseborg of things that I can learn because I'm a learner.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

I love that. You're right. That is a lifelong skill and a skill that would carry on through children after they graduate into their employment and into their relationships and into their own parenting, which would really change a whole community because you're changing one child, one household, one street, one neighborhood, and then the whole county.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

It becomes generational. I mean, we have grandparents. By the way, you don't have to be a biological, we call them, to participate in parent university. Okay. Any adult that's interested in the success of our children is is welcome to come to parent university and take any of the classes we we would encourage them to because children aren't just raised inside the home. They're raised in the community, as you said. So uh when I came up, there were people on my block that if I did something wrong, I knew my mom was going to find out. And we didn't have cell phones. I don't know how they did it. I don't, you know, but I my mom would know that I threw that brick, you know, before I got home. And I know her name. Her name was Miss Smith. And I'm invoking her even today, many years, decades later. And I thought her job was to torment me. It was much later that I realized that Miss Smith loved me and helped raise me. So we create a space in Parent University for the Miss Smiths in the world to exist.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

I love that so much. And I understand there's even a graduation ceremony. Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_00 19:23

Yes, as a matter of fact, there's one coming up very soon, if I may say so, uh, at Pensacola High. It's gonna be our first graduation at uh of at Pensacola, and we're all very happy. It's part of the national model now.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

That's so exciting. Can any Escambia parent or guardian um get involved with these classes?

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Any. We're open to all adults. We're opening all adults. We welcome all adults.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

So even you said all ages, parents of all ages. So if a 17-year-old is a parent, can he or she come?

SPEAKER_00 19:56

We would we would highly encourage and love them up when they get here. Every parent that shows up to Parent University is a heroine. Is a heroine or or hero. Everyone. No one comes in because something's wrong. Every time we see a parent, we're looking at an expert who wants to be better.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

And daycare and food is provided?

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Absolutely. Quality childcare is provided. We have accredited child care and we have delicious food, and there are prizes. As a matter of fact, we have we give away things like laptop computers.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Oh, I love that. Yes. I never underestimate the power of a good prize. Oh my gosh. And applause. Sometimes when I drive by, you know, angry drivers, I'm like, oh, you need a prize and a hand clap.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Yes. You know. Yes, they do. Imagine if everybody did that.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Now, when you do that, you know, pro tip out the window and you clap for them, that is not received in the way that I was, you know, you know, and don't do it, don't do it. But maybe that's what they need. So maybe they should go to parent university and get some appreciation. Um, so where if a parent is listening to this right now, what's their next step to find a class in Escambia County for this?

SPEAKER_00 21:10

You can, I'm gonna give you two things. You can call 912 755 4422. Or you can go online to ParentUniversity SAV. Just the word ParentUniversity SAMalpavictor.org. Parent university, and you'll go online and you'll uh be able to be in contact with me, and I'd love to talk with you about being a part of our next activity.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

That's exciting. And as we wrap up, um, you're from Philadelphia. Yes, and you live in Georgia, and you've developed pr uh programs here in Florida, in Georgia, Illinois, and Michigan. Based on your very unique outside advantage, your new your perspective, what do you want people to know about Escambia County Public Schools?

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Oh my. Um you know, we had to choose. We had to choose where we were going. You know, we have resources and we didn't couldn't go everywhere at once. And we chose to come to uh Pensacola Escambia County, and it was a fantastic decision. It's been the the the schools have been extraordinarily uh welcoming. And what it took us twenty years to really achieve in Savannah, we've achieved it or come very close to achieving it in like a year and a half.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

Really?

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Here in Escambia County. And see, because we're dealing with the folks, the people. And so what I want to say to the school system is that they have great parents out there that are just waiting for someone to engage them in a meaningful way, in a way that's authentic, where they can develop trustful relationships because they're thirsty for knowledge. And we want to change the culture to a culture of learning. That's what they want. We just have to market it correctly.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

I love it. Thank you so much for sharing today. This was amazing.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

Voices United in Education is a production of Escambia County School District. Special thanks to Pine Forest High School for their recording studio facilities and hospitality.