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Rachel Brice Yesenia Ramirez MAEC Connections Conference
May 21, 2025 / DeQuendre Neeley-Bertrand / 0 Comments

Real Relationships, Real Results: Why Family Partnership Is the Future of Learning

Building meaningful partnerships between families and schools isn’t a one-time initiative—it’s an ongoing process that calls for reflection, adaptation, and continuous learning. As the educational landscape evolves and the needs of students and families shift, so too must our approaches to family engagement. This spirit of growth and shared discovery was at the heart of the Connections: An MAEC Family Engagement Event, where educators, families, and community leaders gathered to exchange strategies and deepen their understanding of what truly makes family-school collaboration effective. Among the many sessions designed to foster this collective learning, Parent Teacher Home Visits offered a powerful example of how evidence-based, relational practices can transform school communities and support every child’s success.

Our very own Rachel Brice, Program Director, and Yesenia Ramirez, Training Manager, shared invaluable insights from their extensive experience with the PTHV model. Their presentation highlighted the transformative power of authentic family engagement, emphasizing how building trust and understanding through home visits can fundamentally reshape the educational landscape for students and their communities.

Key Insights from the Conversation

Rachel and Yesenia shared how the PTHV model of home visiting goes beyond traditional outreach, offering a unique approach to genuinely partner with families. They spoke passionately about:

  • The Power of Trust: How voluntary, relational home visits build the foundational trust necessary for true collaboration between home and school.
  • Shifting Mindsets: The profound impact of teachers gaining a deeper understanding of students’ home lives and cultural contexts, which in turn informs more equitable and effective instruction.
  • Centering Family Voice: The importance of seeing families as experts on their own children and involving them as active participants in educational decisions.
  • Tangible Outcomes: How stronger relationships fostered through home visits lead to improvements in student attendance, academic engagement, and overall well-being.

Here are some compelling moments from their presentation:

Rachel set the stage by highlighting the difference between transactional and relational family engagement strategies. She emphasized that the most impactful approaches are:
  • Highly personalized
  • Mutual in nature
  • Linked to student learning
  • Designed to build capacity for both families and educators
Rachel also explained that PTHV is not an intervention to “fix” problems, but a foundational practice to build trust and partnership. Research shows that when 10% or more of students at a school receive a home visit, the entire school community benefits through:
  • Reduced chronic absenteeism
  • Improved academic proficiency
  • Stronger family-school relationships
While the research makes clear that relational, high-impact strategies like Parent Teacher Home Visits can transform school communities, it’s also important to remember that these practices didn’t emerge overnight. In fact, the roots of PTHV stretch back to a time when families and schools in Sacramento were grappling with deep disconnect and mistrust. Yesenia shared the inspiring origin story of PTHV, which began as a grassroots organizing response to a disconnect between families and schools in Sacramento. Through two years of listening and collaboration, parents and teachers together developed the five core practices that define the PTHV model today.
The session was a powerful reminder that real change in schools begins with authentic relationships. PTHV’s model, rooted in community voice and research, offers a proven pathway to stronger, more equitable partnerships between families and educators. For more information about this session and the entire Connections symposium, visit and inquire at https://maec.org.

PTHV advances student success and school improvement by leveraging relationships, research, and a national network of partners to advance evidence-based practices in relational home visits within a comprehensive family engagement strategy.

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916-448-5290
info@pthvp.org
P.O. Box 189084, Sacramento, CA, 95818

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PTHV is a nonprofit grassroots network that must raise its operating budget every year. Like the local home visit projects we help, our network is sustained by collaboration.

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