Ten years ago, we started something that would fundamentally change how our district connects with families. Today, when schools reach out to us asking for their entire staff to be trained in home visits—not because we’re pushing it, but because they’ve seen the results—we know we’ve built something sustainable.

This is the story of how Cajon Valley Union School District grew home visits from a small pilot program to a practice so valued that schools use their own site budgets to fund it.

Meeting Our Community Where They Are

Our journey began around 2017 when our Director of Family and Community Engagement brought Parent Teacher Home Visits to Cajon Valley. We serve an incredibly diverse community—families speaking not just English and Spanish, but Arabic, and languages from refugees and immigrants arriving from all over the world. We were designated as a refugee intake area for many years, which meant we needed to learn about each other in ways we’d never attempted before.

The inspiration was simple but profound: other districts were getting great results from home visits, and we needed to strengthen our family engagement by getting to know our families in ways we hadn’t previously. How do we communicate with each other? How do we support academic growth for students when we don’t fully understand their home contexts?

What made our approach different from the start was our commitment that language would never be a barrier. We had liaisons—most of whom are immigrants or refugees themselves—who could accompany teachers on visits. They understood what families were going through just to get here, and they brought incredible empathy to this work.

Building Buy-In One Teacher at a Time

We started with the teachers who were willing. No mandates, no district-wide rollouts. We walked into schools and said, “This is an idea. People are seeing great things come from it. Would you be interested?”

A few teachers jumped on board immediately. They had fantastic results. Then we created videos featuring these early adopters, used home visit champions at school sites, and let teacher voices do the convincing. It grew grassroots—little by little, as people overcame their natural reluctance about going into someone’s home.

One story illustrates this perfectly: We had a fifth-grade teacher who was already great with families. She gave out her phone number, greeted parents at the door, had warm relationships. When we started doing home visits at her school, she said, “I don’t need to do them. I already have a very good relationship with my parents.”

A colleague convinced her to come along on just one visit. She came back transformed. “I did not understand what you meant by a home visit,” she said. “This was amazing. This was so different than I thought. I thought I was open to parents, but this was very, very different for me.”

We hear this every time we run into someone who’s done a home visit. Their whole face lights up: “Oh my gosh, it was amazing. I just loved it.”

The Evolution of Funding and True Buy-In

Over the years, our funding has evolved in ways that tell the story of growing commitment. We started with a grant that specified refugee families—10 visits per school, but only for newcomer families. Then we expanded as schools saw the benefits and found ways to fund additional visits for any family.

Eventually, we moved to broader grants that opened visits to everyone. But this summer marked a pivotal moment: we had no grant funding and put it out to schools to ask if they would support home visits with their site budgets.

The response amazed us. We ended up with almost as many visits—480 this summer—as we had with grant funding. Nineteen out of our 27 schools participated, even though they were paying teachers their regular contracted rate instead of the higher stipend we’d been able to offer with grants.

Schools were saying, “This is important enough that we’re not going to wait for someone else to fund it. We’re going to contribute our own money.” That was a huge validation. It told us this practice had become valued enough that schools would prioritize it in their budgets.

Summer Visits: Solving the Time Challenge

The biggest barrier we heard from teachers wasn’t money—it was time. “We just don’t have time after a long school day to go visit families. We have our own families to get home to.”

So we pivoted to summer home visits. We started with incoming sixth graders—new students who would benefit most from connecting with teachers before school started. The first year was so successful that we opened it to every grade level, every school.

Teachers love the summer model. They have the time and energy. Students get excited about knowing their teacher before school starts. Kids say, “It was really awesome to know my teacher before school started” or “They came into my room and got to see my posters and my toys.”

This summer, we had 180 staff trained and conducted about 480 home visits between July and August. We’ve increased our numbers every year since we started the summer program.

The Ripple Effects We’ve Measured

The data backs up what teachers tell us anecdotally. Attendance has increased. Classroom participation improves, especially for kids who were reluctant to participate. We’ve seen this particularly with our refugee students who weren’t sure how they belonged in the classroom. After having their teacher be part of their family and share a meal, that child understands their place in the classroom completely differently.

We talk about sense of belonging in Cajon Valley, and our surveys show that kids who’ve had home visits feel much more connected. We even had a student choose home visits as the topic for his TEDx Kids talk—not because he’d received one, but because he saw the impact it had on his brother. He said the difference in his family after the home visit was really marked.

The teacher communication piece is huge. Teachers tell us they’ve never had such easy communication with parents because they already know each other. When there is an issue, reaching out feels completely different.

Beyond Home Visits: A Comprehensive Approach

Home visits are part of our broader family engagement work, which starts with our 17 bilingual liaisons. These liaisons—nearly all immigrants or refugees themselves—run workshops on everything from how to use email to understanding what your child is learning in math. They help parents visit colleges, explore local resources, understand how to support homework at home.

What’s changed over our 10 years is that we’re no longer a small department trying to punch our way into the rest of the district. Other departments now come to us saying, “We need to consider family engagement. Can you help us build this into what we’re doing?” The district has embraced family engagement as necessary to our culture.

We’re part of the California Community Engagement Initiative, working with hundreds of districts statewide on best practices. What started with one or two people has grown to schools actively requesting liaisons and co-funding positions because they see the value.

Lessons for Other Districts

For districts considering home visits, our advice is: start slow. Go slow. Get buy-in from teachers, principals, and administrators. Be prepared with research—make it clear this isn’t just your great idea, but a practice backed by solid evidence.

Find others who are already doing this work. Connect with networks. Learn from districts that have adapted the model to work in their contexts. We’ve learned tremendously from others, and we’re always happy to share what we’ve learned.

Most importantly, listen. We do a lot of listening rather than coming in with preconceived ideas about what our path needs to be. We ask: Where are people walking? Let’s get on that path and see where we can help guide.

Training the Next Generation

One thing we’re particularly proud of is our partnership with San Diego State University’s credentialing program. We spend three full days with 30-40 student teachers each year, imprinting them with the value of family engagement before they ever start their careers. We teach them that family engagement isn’t an add-on you think about years into your career—it’s something you start with from day one.

Many of these student teachers get hired by Cajon Valley and start their careers already knowing about home visits. Some even ask to participate in summer visits before their contracts officially begin.

What’s Next

We want to keep growing—all 27 schools participating, and eventually adding follow-up visits during the school year as the PTHV protocol suggests. Even if we only did follow-up visits with 10% of our summer families, it would continue to blossom throughout our district.

One of the things on Sandra’s email signature says, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” As families find out that our schools care, that our teachers care, that our administrators care, they become true partners. They sit down and listen instead of saying, “It’s the school’s job to take care of it.”

The Test of Sustainability

This summer proved something important to us. When we turned the funding over to sites and asked if they wanted to participate, they stepped up. The data and stories and results had created enough buy-in that schools were willing to invest their own money.

Not even a week into the new school year, a middle school and a charter high school reached out asking for their entire staffs to be trained in home visits. They said, “This is the culture we want to create at our school. This is what we value.”

That’s when you know you’ve built something sustainable. When schools are reaching out to you instead of you reaching out to them. When the conversation shifts from “Would you like home visits?” to “We want this for our entire staff.”

After 10 years, we’ve learned that sustainable change happens one relationship at a time, one willing teacher at a time, one family at a time. But when you listen carefully, support consistently, and let the results speak for themselves, those individual changes add up to something transformational for an entire district.

The work of building authentic relationships with families isn’t just about home visits. But home visits have taught us that when you show up at someone’s door with genuine curiosity and respect, when you ask about their hopes and dreams for their child, when you let families know their teacher in a personal way—everything changes.

That’s the culture we’ve built in Cajon Valley. That’s the foundation that makes everything else possible.

Janice Raymond has been a teacher in the Cajon Valley Union School District for more than 40 years and serves as FACE Teacher Facilitator. Sandra Candler Wafer is a U.S. Air Force veteran and serves as Cajon’s Family and Community Engagement Supervisor.