Tips for parents and guardians to help their children be 100 percent ready for graduation and 100 percent ready for college.

Learning Links

• Union Public Schools offers this reference page for parents who want to provide links of educational interest for their children. Many teachers also utilize learning links and/or homework assignments on their teacher web pages.

Stand for Children

• New organization gathering support called Stand for Children hopes to champion policy and budget choices across several states to benefit children in public schools. Learn more about Stand for Children.

Important Safety Tips to Teach Your Children

• Constantly watching over your children's every move may not be possible, even at home. With that said, here are some useful rules worth laying down to make sure that they stay out of harm's way even when you are not immediately present.

Educational Terms to Know

• Parents today are inundated with an evolving list of educational terms when exploring schools for their child. An understanding of these terms can help guide a parent through the educational maze.
• Click here for a list of some of these terms that a parent might encounter when seeking a public or private school for their child.
• See also Union Glossary and Union Acronyms.

Homework Help

• Tulsa City-County Library offers parents homework help. See www.tulsalibrary.org/homeworkhelp/
• Get free online homework assistance from your home, school or library.
• Use your Tulsa City-County Library card to access Homework Help Now! for the following assistance:

Building Good Attendance Habits and Reading

• http://www.attendanceworks.org/ and http://www.reachoutandread.org/
• Every year, one in 10 kindergarten and first grade students misses a month of school with excused and unexcused absences. By middle and high school, the rates of chronic absence are far higher. Starting in kindergarten, these absences can affect academic achievement, especially for low-income students unable to make up for lost time, research shows. They can leave children unable to read well by the end of 3rd grade, exacerbating the achievement gap. And they can set a pattern of poor attendance and academic failure for older students, fueling the dropout rate.

Videos to help protect students against online manipulation

Truth Labs for Education is a collaboration between Cambridge University, the University of Bristol, and Google Jigsaw. They created a series of short videos designed to help people resist unwanted persuasion online. The videos are rooted in a framework from social psychology called inoculation theory, which posits that by exposing people to a weakened dose of a persuasive argument or technique and pre-emptively refuting it, they develop psychological resistance against future manipulative persuasion attempts.

They created 5 videos, each of which “inoculates” people against a particular manipulation technique or misleading rhetorical device commonly encountered online: ad hominem attacks, using emotional language to evoke fear or outrage, false dichotomies, incoherence, and scapegoating.

VIDEO #1:  EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE:  Inoculation Science - Videos - Emotional Language

VIDEO #2:  INCOHERENCE:  Inoculation Science - Videos - Incoherent Arguments

VIDEO #3:  FALSE DICHOTOMY:  Inoculation Science - Videos - False Dichotomies

VIDEO #4:  SCAPEGOATING:  Inoculation Science - Videos - Scapegoating

VIDEO #5:  AD HOMINEM ATTACKS:  Inoculation Science - Videos - Ad-hominem Attacks

This short video from the Stanford History Education Group explains how to use lateral reading to vet online resources and outlines the research behind it. Source: Stanford History Education Group (2020):  https://youtu.be/SHNprb2hgzU