Parent Teacher Home Visits is celebrating 25 years of building trusting relationships between schools and families. To commemorate our Silver Anniversary, we are sharing the stories of close friends, partners, and allies who have helped make PTHV what it is today. Watch this space regularly to see more “impact stories.” In this post, we hear from Lysette Lemay, the Director of the Family and Community Engagement Department for Elk Grove Unified, about her personal experiences and the broader impact of the PTHV.

I had been a teacher for 11 years, one year in Fresno and 10 years in Sacramento. In my 12th year of teaching, I began working at one of the priority schools in the Sacramento City Unified District where I first heard about Parent Teacher Home Visits.

As a priority school, we were taking on lots of new strategies to try to engage our families and build connection and community between the school and home. The first strategy we were trained in was Parent Teacher Home Visits in 2010. It just made sense to me. Before I knew about the formal home visit model, I knew the importance of connecting with my students’ families. I was the teacher who was always invited to soccer games, birthday parties, and even baby showers. I was known to be in the community, visiting students’ homes and celebrating and joining in. Connecting with people has always been innate. I didn’t learn it in teacher preparation courses, and there was nobody else on campus or my team at the time who encouraged it or even talked about doing anything like that. I just always thought, if a student’s mom or grandma thought enough of me to extend an invitation, then who am I to decline that invitation?

At the time we got our training, we were a brand new staff at a very small school. We figured out who we wanted to partner with, and our strategy was to visit as many students as we could. We literally went down our class list, called the families, and whoever said yes, we would visit them. Whoever said no, we would revisit the question with the family next time.

I taught first grade for two years there, and I remember a special visit with a student named Elise. And her mom, Miss Alicia, would bring her daughter to school, and she’d stand in line and wait to say hi. We developed an easy rapport, and eventually, I approached her about the idea of doing a home visit. She agreed. You know, every home visit is different, so you don’t know what to expect. I can laugh now at what happened. It wasn’t just Alicia and her mom there; it was the whole family: dad, siblings, grandma—the living room was full. We were talking and getting to know each other. We talked about hopes and dreams. Miss Alicia had prepared dinner, even though upfront we said we would only be there about 30 minutes, so we said please don’t go to any trouble. But, again, she has taken the time to prepare dinner. Who am I to say, “No, thank you?” I like to eat anyway.

So we sat down to have dinner, and it was a lovely steak and green beans, and I believe a baked potato or mashed potatoes. I honed in on the steak and the green beans because even though I like to eat, those are the two foods I do not like—at all. I used to tell this story in trainings, I’d pause right there, and people would ask, “What did you do? Did you eat it? Did you say no?” And I would say, “No, that night, I ate steak, green beans, and baked potato.” Even though I would rather not, it’s just a preference, and I felt strongly that I needed to honor her time and honor the fact that she thought enough of me that she wanted to present me with that meal.

I guess I did a good job of faking it til I made it because she didn’t know until she heard me tell this story years later that I didn’t like either of those things. When I was training others on the PTHV model, I always would tell people, obviously, I’m not telling you to eat something you don’t want to eat on a home visit. There are other ways to take care of yourself, but in that moment, that was a choice that I made to honor the family’s time and effort. So that remains one of my most memorable home visits. After that, Miss Alicia became a regular—a staple, really—in our classroom, helping out and chaperoning field trips, and pretty much anything I asked her to do.

Students grew, too, as a result of home visits. I remember in particular, their writing became stronger. I think it was because the ideas that we were able to come up with were generated oftentimes from something that I learned in a home visit. As an example, I learned that one of my students whom I visited was an avid wrestling fan. After that, I made sure there were books in the library now that he could read about different wrestlers. I learned who John Cena was, I didn’t know before then. So from an academic standpoint, home visits made students and their families more engaged and willing to have conversations about academics. My work as an educator then was to tap into students’ interests to really help them in their development. Home visits made me a more connected educator. I was able to make learning more relevant for my students just by talking about something we learned in a home visit, like their pets, sports, or their grandparents. It was across the board, whether the students were the littles or the bigs.

From the practice of home visits, I learned that all families, no matter what, have a hope and a dream for their students. It can be as simple as wanting their students to finish high school because maybe that was something that they didn’t get a chance to do or never happened in their family all the way up to wanting their child to go to Harvard. It always made me remember that our families have the same hopes and dreams that I had for my kids when I was raising them, and so together, we’re helping the kids get on the path to realizing those dreams.