We posted earlier this week about a school district in South Carolina that is considering mandating parent volunteering. You might imagine there are many different opinions on this topic—a peek at our Facebook post about this story will attest to that. But no matter what you think of mandates, it’s clear that parent involvement makes an impact on a student’s academic success. Two stories published today tell us that.

First, the state of Florida published a ranking of 3,078 public and charter schools based on academic performance in standardized testing. The number one school was Bevis Elementary in Lithia. The school reports it was the recipient of 13,000 parent volunteer hours last year and said the many hours parent volunteers spent tutoring students contributed to these results.

Meanwhile, a Grand Rapids, Mich., publication reported on a presentation at Hope College from the founders of the Watts Learning Center in Los Angeles, a K-8 charter school founded in the late 1990s in a historically poor neighborhood. The school has been named California state school of the year four times. It requires its parents to volunteer, attend parent workshops, and participate in parent-student-teacher meetings.

Congratulations to both of these schools.