Today, many education leaders think about PTHV home visits as a critical practice that improves student and school outcomes – and it does just that. But PTHV didn’t actually start with home visits as we know them today. It started with the fundamental act of parents and teachers rolling up their sleeves, building relationships of trust with one another, and getting results.

Yesenia Ramirez, PTHV founding parent and senior advisor, recalls that for her, desperation and hope lived side-by-side during those early years. The events that led to our founding began in 1996. Yesenia was a single mom of six girls, and she was terrified that her eldest – a fifth-grader – was reading at a second-grade level. Yesenia remembers,

I felt so defeated because I didn’t have an education; I didn’t know how to help her. I knew that if I didn’t find someone who could help her, she would just be lost. And her five little sisters would be right behind her. If I stayed quiet, nothing would change.

Yesenia faced a local school system that she felt, at the time, alienated families, had aging portable classrooms with no air conditioning (although Sacramento springs and summers regularly have oppressive 100+ degree days), and tolerated the grim statistic of 0.8% of students reading at grade level. Nevertheless, she persisted. She sat in the school office for hours at a time, waiting for someone to help her. She asked a teacher multiple times for advice on how to help her daughter improve her reading skills – to no avail.

Hope eventually came in the form of Gloria Hernandez, the school’s new vice-principal, who was committed to engaging families, improving school conditions, and bolstering student outcomes. Yesenia, Gloria, and a small handful of other parents and teachers came together to launch a community organizing effort through Sacramento Area Congregations Together (ACT). For Yesenia,

That’s where hope began. Jocelyn, Sandy [two other parents], and I handed out flyers outside the school to get more parents involved. At first, few people joined, but little by little, we started cleaning up the neighborhood. We got the city to install street lights, remove abandoned cars, and clean up abandoned houses. As I got to know teachers and other parents, I realized that, together, we could actually change things. 

Drawing on their newfound sense of accomplishment, confidence, and trust, this powerful team of parents and educators went on to create the PTHV model that we know today. In thriving PTHV practices across the country, these same kinds of human connections often still provide the fertile ground where desperation turns to hope.