Parental Involvement, Relationships, & Community Support: Differences in School Environment Among Boys and Girls in Rural Guatemala

Background and Purpose: Literacy rates in Guatemala have increased in recent years but still range between 40% to 90% depending on the community. Poverty and malnutrition continue to be endemic problems that hinder school attendance, educational attainment, and academic achievement. Educational reform has emphasized a bilingual Spanish and K'iche curriculum in the northern highlands region of Guatemala, which houses large indigenous Mayan populations who speak Spanish as a second language. Several challenges exist in this region in regards to education reform, including gender disparities in educational attainment, lack of parental engagement in schooling, and varied views of the importance of education in the community. School safety can be an issue for many rural schools, as fear of violence frequently causes parents to withdraw their children from school, and negative school environment is known to decrease student educational success. A positive school environment can include a sense of belonging, trust, student attentiveness, and student perception of success.  

Methods: Data were collected in Summer of 2017 through an evaluation of the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program in the Department of Totonicapán, Guatemala. The sample includes 1,590 sixth grade students from 120 schools. We used Stata 15.1 and developed a path analysis model to answer the primary research question: What influences do relationship with peers, relationship with teachers, parental support, and sense of community, have on school environment? We separated the analysis by gender.  The dependent variable is a summed measure of negative school environment consisting of four Likert scale items, whose overall score ranged from 3-15 (α=0.66), developed by Moon and Alarid (2015). The independent variables are summed scales of parental involvement (α=0.52), relationships with peer (sα=0.63), relationships with teachers (α=0.76) and sense of community (α=0.64), all developed by Zullig et al., 2015.

Results: For boys and girls, there was an indirect effect of peers on sense of community through parental involvement (p_boys=0.03, p<0.001; p_girls=0.04, p<0.001) and an indirect effect of relationship with teachers and sense of community through parental involvement (p_boys=0.07, p<0.001; p_girls=0.10, p<0.001). Additionally, for boy there was an indirect effect of relationship with peers and school environment through parental involvement (p_boys=0.03, p<0.001) and an indirect effect of relationship with teacher and school environment through parental involvement (p_boys=0.08, p<0.001). Both models presented a good fit and were able to reproduce the implied variance-covariance matrix, as the chi-square for boys was 0.27 (p> 0.05) and for girls was 0.96 (p>0.05). Additionally, RMSEA for each model was 0.00 (below the 0.05 cut-point) and the CFI was 1.00 (above the 0.95 cut-point).

Discussion and Implications: This is the first empirical examination of school climate in the context of Guatemala or Central America. These findings suggest that teacher-student relationships may be a critical point of intervention to improve school climate, and that staff should work to build positive relationships whenever possible. Future research should examine the extent to which school climate is linked to other sources of risk and resilience in the surrounding community.