Home Visits have been a game-changer for parent, student, and teacher collaboration and active participation in the overall performance and wellbeing of the student. I believe that one of the most important things we can do to support our students is to build strong relationships between families and schools. I have had the fortunate experience of inheriting such an incredible program from my predecessor, who was also active in home visits.
I have the beauty of running the Denver Public Schools, a massive organization of over 90,000 students and 14,000 employees. Often, I receive a lot of briefings which I pore over, and one day I received a special request, and my interest was piqued. I said, “Wait, what is this request?”

Asking this question propelled me to visit a home in one of our north high schools, a flagship high school, in the spring semester of last year. Since that opportunity, I have noticed in hindsight that the program is designed to support our vision for family and community engagement.

In fact, I am grateful to have been a participant because it could have been missed in my briefings. It’s easy for someone who is in charge of the strategic vision of a large organization to lose sight of every detail of what is happening, where it is happening, and the incredible work that is happening in such a large district.

Frankly, I didn’t understand what I was saying yes to when I was first invited to a home visit. However, I had gained a bit of experience on that front. I was a counselor and a baseball coach, so I developed a strong connection with my student-athletes. So, I was able to break down the wall of defense that was evident in some homes.

Usually, when you think of a home visit, it’s either a wellness check or specifically targeted around a selected area. Surprisingly, Parent Teacher Home Visits was the opposite of that.
I was doing this with a pair of educators right in the family’s living room. It was basically a student-led conference at home with the parents as participants. I engaged in the process by commenting on a fireman’s helmet hanging on the wall. Excitedly, the dad began telling me about his firefighting career in Mexico and what he’s currently doing in the United States. In hindsight, I wonder how many lives we would’ve transformed if we had home visits when I was growing up in the Bronx, New York.

I believe in home visits so much that I’ve made them part of a strategic roadmap guiding our school district in Denver for the next four years. Parental engagement is terrific. Parental involvement is awesome. But when you combine that with parental empowerment – which Parent Teacher Home Visits does – the experience will be truly elevated. PTHV takes care of engagement, involvement, and empowerment to strengthen their children’s educational journeys.

The impact of the PTHV in Denver Public Schools (DPS) is a win for our scholars, our families, and our educators. That’s a win-win-win. PTHV provides our educators with meaningful engagements with the families – as teachers actually sit down to engage and connect with students and their families during these visits.

Because of the visits, our students are inspired and motivated to perform well in the classrooms because we’ve taken the classrooms to their living rooms or wherever we are connecting with them. Additionally, families are becoming invested because they can see how the teachers care about their kids’ academic performance and their wellbeing.

Parent Teacher Home Visits has empowered parents to become more active in schools and even as part of our staff. I can see that extending to our governing board and even our state board. Noticeably, PTHV allows our teachers to build bridges and opens up lines of communication with families.

I encourage district superintendents, deputy superintendents, chiefs, directors, and principals to engage in this initiative as a regular practice in their schools because it will go a long way toward strengthening the connections between the parents, students, and teachers.