In 1998, I returned to Denver after completing my master’s program in Detroit and having taught for two years in Detroit Public Schools. I was hired at a highly impacted school, in the most impacted neighborhood, in the state of Colorado. The term “highly impacted school” refers to those with multiple risk factors that jeopardize student success, including high student mobility, high concentrations of community poverty, and high numbers of students who are learning English.

Fairview Elementary was highly impacted in every sense of the word. I would use the word “struggle” to describe my first two years there. I was in the third wave of new employees at the school. There were three years of near-100 percent turnover. Everyone was gone from year one. Year two: same thing. I was in that group of new hires—all new teachers in the school, all new administrators, all new employees, and all new curriculum. People would say candidly that the neighborhood had been in a precarious position for years. The community didn’t trust anyone or anything.

In 2000 we got a new principal, but we were still struggling. There was still no relationship between the community and the school. The new principal’s husband worked for a faith-based organization that was connected to the community organization that worked with Yesenia Ramirez and Jocelyn Graves to found Parent Teacher Home Visits in Sacramento. By that point, PTHV had launched its first pilot of eight schools. Through our connections, we got Yesenia and Jocelyn to come to our school in Denver to help do a training. This was the first time they’d ever done a training outside of their Sacramento neighborhood.

At the same time, our school was working with a similar community organizing group here in Denver. Then it was called Metropolitan Organizations for People. Today, it’s known as Together Colorado. There was a kind of synergy because we had been familiarized with grassroots organizing, and we had been exposed to this concept of door-knocking and one-on-ones. Yesenia and Jocelyn came to our school, and together with the Colorado group, did a training for our little school that was struggling so much to begin to build a bridge to the community. We had a small staff—20 people all told, and somewhere near 400 kids. I remember the day fondly that they trained us in this thing called Parent Teacher Home Visits. We were sitting in the auditorium. We had flip charts and so much paper—the old school stuff with markers and stickies. We all sat listening and we would write things down on charts and tape them up on the wall and have these incredibly deep conversations about how can we find out what the community wants, what parents need, how to get families engaged, and how all of this would even work after so much damage had been done over the years.

And how we could create trust where none existed.

That’s how it got started. That’s how PTHV became a national organization: two communities experiencing similar issues and reaching out to learn from and help one another. The Colorado Education Association supported us with a grant to pay teachers to conduct home visits that first year. Yesenia left an old folder full of Xerox copies of guidance documents for us to follow. She also left an old VHS tape that had the original advertising video that they created. They had shown it to us during the training, and everyone had remarked about how powerful it was.

We began home visits in earnest, and everyone loved them. But my cohort of teachers didn’t last very long, just as the waves before us. Instead of complete turnover, it was only about half this time. By the second year, we all wanted to resurrect the home visit training to get new staff on board. During a staff meeting, I whipped out that old VHS, the flip charts, and stickies and reviewed our training. Our home visit practice was revived for a second year.

Then the money ran out.

I, along with one other teacher, and the principal were willing to continue home visits without getting paid. And so we did it on our own. And we did home visits at the beginning of the year for about seven years. At subsequent staff meetings, I showed that video to staff while we continued our efforts to find new funding. I reached out to the national office and spoke with PTHV’s former Executive Director Carrie Rose to ask if she could help us in our quest. She invited us to PTHV’s national convening in Washington, DC, where home visit practitioners met. Not only did that gathering give us a networking opportunity, but we got plugged into a learning community that helped us to revitalize our practice. We did another formal training because by then, our staff had stabilized. Our home visit practice took off. Everyone in the building was trained, and parents loved it. It changed things—immediately.

Over time, we became known for our home visit practice. A new superintendent (Tom Boasberg) came to Denver Public Schools. As he was onboarding, he was going to schools giving presentations, doing media interviews, and conducting listening sessions with hundreds of teachers at a time. I wanted to impress upon him how successful our home visit practice was and get him to commit to expanding it to other schools. I used the same tactics that the grassroots faith-based organization taught us when we were getting started: Challenge your officials. Ask a question and frame it so they can’t get out of it. Make them make a promise. And so that was what I did. I went to the microphone and asked, “Would you be willing to go on a Parent Teacher Home Visit with me to visit one of our Fairview families here in this neighborhood sometime in the next three months?” And he could not say no because the press was there. He replied, “Talk to my people. We’ll get this arranged.” I did.

Tom eventually became a champion of Parent Teacher Home Visits. He used to tell the story jokingly, saying that I’d really irritated him when I asked that question in front of everyone. He was so busy and was just starting out, but it turned out to be a very good thing. And he followed through, and we went on a visit with Nathaniel’s family, who lived a short walk from the school. The local news came along, too.

We sat on Nathaniel’s family sofa with the kids running around crazy. It was as noisy as could be. The TVs were on. The stereo was on. It was total chaos, and it was perfect.

The superintendent asked the family, “What are your hopes and dreams?” Nathaniel wanted to be a basketball player. And Tom said, “You know what, I’m a basketball player.”  Tom had actually very recently had surgery on his knee, and he had a brace on his leg. He told Nathaniel that his injury came from basketball, that he’d played basketball in college. At that moment, it was no longer the superintendent of Denver Public Schools and the news team there anymore. It was just Tom sitting there on the sofa with me talking to Nathaniel and his mom about basketball. It was really awesome.

After we finished that visit, we walked back to school and Tom asked me how much does a home visit practice cost. I said, we’ve been working with hardly anything for years now. We had about $5,000 the last couple of years to pay everybody. We paid teachers $20 for each visit. He was shocked at how little it cost. He understood at that moment that we could replicate our home visit practice to more schools. He promised to get funding, and he did. He created a whole initiative with it and used general fund money from the school district, which was unusual.

We got five elementary schools on board, and we did the same thing they had done in Sacramento. We started with a pilot program. The Sacramento team came out here again and trained everybody. Eventually they trained us at Fairview to become trainers. We had four or five training teams, all from Fairview. We had teachers and parents on each training team. One teacher was the facilitator of the meeting. The other was the teacher representative, and the parent was the parent representative. And that was how the trainings worked at that time and they were all live and in person. We ended up training more than 1,000 teachers in the first two years after that. Once we got started, it sped up and doubled and tripled, and now almost all of DPS does it.

It’s hard to believe we came from a place of grave mistrust to a practice that works in all our schools. But I had faith from the very beginning. I came to teaching through the Peace Corps. After college, I went to Honduras where I was a mental health volunteer, an HIV prevention specialist. At the time, and in the place where I was stationed, many people considered HIV and AIDS a mental illness because you’re mentally ill if you’re gay. My job became training teachers on how to teach sex education and HIV prevention. And I was in a rural developing nation with extreme poverty. I did that for three years, and then I got a job teaching sixth-grade at an American school in the capital. I went from working in the country at the top of a mountain in a very rural area with extreme poverty to teaching at the American school with the elites and super rich. I did it for two years, but I much preferred working with the kids who appreciated what they were getting, and the families who appreciated everything and had never learned any of this stuff before.

Those are the experiences I kept in my heart when I came back to the United States. I started in a program at the University of Michigan that was designed for ex-Peace Corps volunteers to become teachers in highly impacted areas and urban districts around the country. Coming from a Peace Corps background, you are often dealing with extreme need. You have to be super flexible, and you have to be able to think on your feet and apply those skills to teaching in severely disadvantaged urban schools. That’s why I became a teacher in Detroit, Michigan, in the toughest of the toughest of the roughest of the roughest parts of Detroit. I was mugged twice and carjacked twice, a couple times right within a block of the school. The school parking lot had barbed wire at the top, and teachers’ cars were still stolen. Teachers were robbed at gunpoint on a regular basis. It was super intense: metal detectors to get into the elementary school. Security guards for the elementary school. All of that prepared me. I made a commitment during that graduate program to work in schools in these kinds of environments, with the kids who most needed it, wherever that was. I headed back home to Denver and looked for the schools that were most in need. I got the job at Fairview. I was ready for this.

However, it still was tough. The intensity of the abuse that my kids were survivors of here in Denver was worse than anything I’ve ever seen. There were many families coming out of shelters and trying to transition into homes. There were families with relatives who were coming out of jail. Most of the homes were headed by single mothers. It was just every trauma imaginable that people were living with.

That’s why, when I heard about home visits and about Yesenia and Jocelyn, it was an immediate yes because it took me back to Peace Corps when I was in Honduras and I had to find out what people needed. I talked to people and knocked on doors and tried to find ways to establish trust. It was perfect for this guy.

I like to tell people Parent Teacher Home Visits is what has kept me in my career as long as it has. I stayed at Fairview 18 years. I retired and started my own private tutoring business so I could stay close to teaching and learning. But the home visiting helped me stay joyous in my teaching. It reminded me of why I wanted to teach in the first place. And I just loved building relationships with families. That’s what Parent Teacher Home Visits gave me.

My hope and dream is that PTHV always maintains the original grassroots feeling and approach no matter what development and changes happen over the next few years. We are growing, and with the pandemic came a lot of changes, but what makes it all work is that solid set of core principles that were developed at the start.